I'm sick. The moment I realized I got sick, I thought of my mother.

I don't know if it's because of my nature, or because of the environment around me, I've been a melancholic child since birth. Perhaps it is because of the melancholy that my physical resistance is also so weak that a little wind and rain can bring me sick. Mother sees with her eyes, hurts within her heart. Whenever my mother was free from her busy work, she would take me out of our house, away from the suffocating and crisis-ridden city, and into the arms of nature for some fresh air. The place we visited most often was the mountains in the far countryside, where there were many caves. The temperature in these caves was comforting. Here the air was pure, the water was flowing and the grass was blooming. Mother and I moved from one cave to another cave, picking flowers, catching butterflies, collecting shells, doing sport... Here, I also met with my later friend who was my age at that time. That day, mother and I met him and a young gentleman with long hair and long skirt in one cave. We had almost never seen somebody else in such a remote area so we played hide-and-seek together… It was really a rare happy time in my whole childhood, and this scene of our four people playing together is still vivid today.

I grew up day by day. After reaching adulthood, I left our house and ventured into the wider world. Yet whenever I am sick, and wherever I am, my mother is always the first to notice of my illness and miraculously arrives at my bedside, brings me nutritious food and puts her cool palm on my hot, lava-like head. Mother’s hands have a unique texture that feels like a monolith (I think it must be the reason for that my high fever doesn’t burn her). But it is also a weightless monolith, because not only does mother have great strength, but she also has the incredible control over the force of touch, which removes the oppressiveness of the stone weight while retaining that soothing stone temperature.

While I aspire to be a great artist, my sickly constitution continues to plague me. Once sick, not only is my physiology affected (including but not limited to dizziness, bleary-eyes, and muscle weakness), but my creativity, on which I am proud to rely, is also seriously threatened. The impoverishment of ideas had me tossing and turning with restlessness. How can I claim to be an artist when I've lost my creativity? We all know that competition in today's world is fierce. Up from the arms race and trade wars between countries, down to the university graduates looking for jobs and these exams for primary and secondary school students, if you can't stay focused at all times, you can easily be eliminated by this cruel society. The art world is no exception. If one fails to keep up with the pace of our time and produce works that respond to the problems of our time, one will not only be disapproved and shunned by peers in the circle, but also be ridiculed and dumped by the masses. In order not to become an outcast of our time, even if I didn't have any good ideas for the moment, I had to at least do something to express the perseverance of my will and my spirit of caring the world. I gritted my teeth, stood up, staggered to the studio door, raised my trembling arms... Yet every time this happened, my mother's stone-like, solemn hand would slowly fall upon my hand which had already gripped on the door handle. Unlike the light hand touching my head, this hand had a lot of weight (I think it at least has the same weight as the Five Fingers Mountain that trapped the Monkey King). And although it didn't cause me any pain, I couldn't move my hand at all. I looked at my mother in puzzlement, only to see her shake her head firmly, gesturing for me to return to bed and rest.

For a while, I couldn't understand my mother's action. I just thought maybe she loved me too much so that she didn’t want me to suffer more from my illness at work. But if I didn't work, the physical pain was reduced while the mental pain was multiplied. Mother was nothing more than an ordinary woman! She loved me but could neither understand the avant-gardeness of art nor the tremendous ambition of the artist, and therefore could never understand my suffering. When I thought about it, my heart was as muddled as if I had spilled all the sauce bottles. I couldn't bear to go against mother, and whenever I tried to do so, the image of mother in her young age came to my mind: in the library, highly nearsighted, bent over the desk, thick lenses clinging to the pages, straining to read the parenting guide written by the foreign thinker from the Lumières, jotting down notes in a small book on one side. My poor mother! What she didn't know was that the book she was reading was outdated even at her time.

Finally, a severe illness pushed my anxiety to the limit, and I could no longer bear the act of my mother. With my weak throat, I cried out to her. "Do you understand anything about art? Do you understand what contemporary is? Do you understand me? If you don't understand, please stop stopping me!"

Air froze, my mother looked at me in surprise, and I stared back at her angrily. It seemed that my overloaded heart was expecting an answer to something.

"Silly kid, does art have no way out but only to create?"

I looked at my mother dumbfounded, not knowing how to answer or even if I understood her question. At that moment, my mother's weighty hand wasn't letting go in the slightest, but the burden that was coercing on my heart day and night suddenly became lighter. Mother may not understand my art, just as she does not understand pharmakon and cannot heal me. But mother has been also persevering her own art! Mother's hand kept pressing against mine, and gradually my skin was permeated by the teaching from the stone. Mother's stoppage was more than simply worrying about my physical health, it was a delivery of her peculiar art. Mother is the very most tender Medusa, never petrifies others from the outside, just silently lumped herself into rock from the inside - what a process it is! Over these years, mother, who was ordinary in my eyes and had no creativity whatsoever, had undergone an extraordinary metamorphosis in her own body. It was me, however, that questioned my mother shamelessly, conjectured recklessly and looked down on her past, without knowing that I was in fact the one who really didn’t understand what art is! My face, which had been burning red due to the fever turning to purple with ignominy, turned away with a lowered head, not wanting mother to see my disappointing tears.

I often think that my mother will grow old one day. By that time, I must take good care of her. But I suppose my mother, who is like a stone, would have lived a long life, while could the frail and sickly me really hold on to life until the moment she left the world? Maybe I'll die before she does. In that case, who will serve her, care for her, love her? Indeed, mother alone can be lonely, but if mother is really a rock, will she still feel lonely? Maybe she'll go to the cave where we used to spend our time and really become a rock. With the mountains at her side, she wouldn't be lonely anymore. But I shouldn't have been so pessimistic early on, since my mother was able to turn her body into stone, then as her son I could at least turn it into something healthy. And since I still aspire to be a great artist, I can't just die so easily. I must cultivate my body, so that I can become like my mother and morph into a truly great art…

Ah, Mom, are you coming soon? I’m really sleepy now. Will you read this? The whisper I inscribed on my heart. The fiery hot breath puffing out of my big nose.