In-Between: Painting the Energies of Translation

When language fails to communicate cultural experience, I turn to images. Through painting, I investigate how visual forms can translate what words cannot express. This reflection traces my research from the concept of “field” to Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh,” from tarot symbolism to Jiama ritual images, showing how image-making becomes a way to bridge cultural gaps and make invisible energy visible.

From “Field” to “Flesh”: From External Space to Intertwined Perception

In Unit 3, I gradually shifted from the socio-anthropological “field” to the phenomenological concept of “flesh.” Merleau-Ponty proposed the concept of “flesh” to break down the opposition between subject and object, world and consciousness. He believed that people do not understand the world through thinking, but through the body to perceive and participate in the world. There is an “intertwined co-existence” between body and world. When I understood this, I suddenly realized that this intertwining is precisely my real experience between Bai identity and culture—I am not an observer, but an existence that is drawn in, touched, and affected.

The concept of “flesh” made me rethink the relationship between language and perception. Language is no longer just a symbol for communication, but an extension of thought and body. Merleau-Ponty said “language is the flesh of thought,” which reminded me of the communication between my grandmother and me. She only speaks Bai language, and I can understand her language; but when I try to communicate with her in Chinese, my mother needs to translate my words into Bai language for her to understand. Although the information is conveyed, the emotion, tone, and warmth are lost. This loss is not a language problem, but a perceptual rupture—I cannot touch her experience through the same “embodied language.” I call this “language rupture,” or more precisely, “the untranslatability of perception.”

Language Rupture and Untranslatability

This “language rupture” became a metaphor in my creation. I realized that many languages are inherently untranslatable because they carry specific culture, history, and bodily experience. For example, certain words in Bai language cannot find corresponding expressions in Mandarin or English; their meanings often depend on specific contexts, emotions, and bodily movements. When language loses the support of the body, it loses its “flesh.”

I began to think: Is there a language beyond words? Can we re-establish “perceptual connection” through images, sounds, or ritual behaviors? Art may be such a medium. Painting is not just reproducing images, but a “visualized language,” a “writing of body and energy.”

Zimbabwean artist Kudzanai-Violet Hwami also wanders between “homeland” and “foreign land,” “self” and “cultural roots.” She once tried to re-establish connection with her homeland by revisiting Zimbabwe, but realized in the process that belonging cannot be obtained simply by returning to the origin. On the contrary, the state of “inability to fully integrate” is her most authentic experience.

I am particularly attracted to the layered and collage structure in her paintings. She often juxtaposes body fragments, old photos, internet images, and bright color blocks in one picture, creating a space torn by time, memory, and emotion. That picture is not “reconstructing memory,” but visually presenting the tension of multiple identities existing simultaneously.

Antonio Pichillá Quiacaín, an artist of Maya-Tz’utujil descent, constructed through his work a dialogue space connecting tradition and modernity, local and global. His textile work “Abuelo” (Grandfather) shows a complex strategy of cultural resistance and inheritance, with implications far beyond the surface abstract geometric structure. This work uses the black and white patterns of traditional men’s pants worn by elders in Pichillá’s hometown of San Pedro La Laguna as background, overlaid with vertically arranged red and black lines, creating a visual effect reminiscent of Latin American geometric abstract art. However, this formal choice is not merely aesthetic, but a profound cultural political act. Against the background of Guatemalan men gradually abandoning traditional clothing, Pichillá’s work becomes a declaration against cultural extinction through the inheritance of ikat weaving techniques. The red lines symbolize the colors of various American corns—crops that have had sacred significance since the Classic Maya period and have been protected by indigenous communities from monopolization by multinational corporations.

From a semiotic perspective, Pichillá’s work constructs a visual text that interweaves family lineage (the title “Grandfather”), cultural craft (ikat weaving), and anti-colonial resistance (adherence to tradition), forming a complex cultural interpretation system. This creative method has deep resonance with my practice as a Bai artist—we are both exploring how to rebuild connections in cultural rupture, how to transform marginalization into creativity.

The work becomes a declaration against cultural extinction through the inheritance of ikat weaving techniques.

This made me re-understand my own painting. The “field” and “ritual images” used in my work are not restoring Bai culture, but exploring through visual language an energy that cannot be translated but truly exists—like Hwami and Antonio, I reorganize cultural experience through symbols and rituals. We are all using images as a “medium of translation” to make cultural energy that cannot be directly communicated visible.

This idea became a very important starting point for my creation in Unit 3.

Tarot and Energy Visualization: Bridge Between Material and Spirit

In Unit 2, I studied the symbolic system of tarot cards. Initially, it was simply because I believed tarot cards were a way to explore one’s inner world. Tarot is a visual language and also a belief system. In Unit 3, I began to combine tarot with Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh.” Its symbolic system points to both the material world and the spiritual world, as a kind of “intermediate medium.” I understand this duality as a way of “visualizing energy.”

What fascinates me about tarot is that it breaks through the limitations of language in some sense. It establishes a bridge of communication through symbols and visuals. Each card has an open space for interpretation, and the process of meaning generation between the viewer and the card itself embodies “the intertwining of subject and object.” This perception of image meaning is an intuition. Even though tarot cards have books with fixed interpretations and card reading methods, it is actually more about the reader’s own perception of the drawn cards. When I first started learning tarot, I could only interpret card meanings by consulting books, but when I felt the energy field of tarot cards, I no longer needed books. More reliance was placed on my own sensing of the energy field of drawn cards to speak the card’s answer to my question, which was often correct.

I realized that tarot cards make one’s perception of the world’s energy visible through images. This has amazing resonance with what Merleau-Ponty called “flesh.” My painting began to borrow this structure—images are no longer just expressing a definite theme, but become a “generative language field,” a flow of vision and perception. As Susanne Langer said, “In art, form is abstracted only to become visible, and form breaks away from its usual function only to gain a new function—to serve as a symbol to express human emotions.” This requires the audience to interpret and feel what the picture wants to express to them. Like the “representation” theory mentioned in Wollheim’s reflections, different people seeing the same cloud will think it looks like different things, related to their own experiences and perceptions. How one understands and perceives the meaning and energy of images and symbols in the painting will give the work new meaning. So I don’t think my work needs a “decoding” process to explain and make the audience understand the meaning behind my painting. The so-called “decoding” is like tarot books—after knowing the fixed meaning of each card, reading the cards will only bind oneself to these meanings and be unable to truly perceive what the card wants to express to you personally, that is, the unique perception you give to the image through energy exchange with the card.

When I paint those magnetic fields and symbolic forms in my work, I am actually “visualizing energy within language or communication”—making emotions, energy, and subconsciousness that cannot be spoken in language visible. These images are no longer “representing something,” but “manifesting a kind of communication.”

Jiama Culture and Ritual Introduction: Translation from Language to Body

At this stage, I returned to Bai culture. Jiama is an ancient and primitive woodblock print, called “paper talisman” by the Bai people, with the Bai Jiama from the Dali region being most representative. People burn Jiama when worshipping gods, visiting graves, exorcising evil, and praying for blessings, to communicate the connection between humans and gods. Jiama is not only a ritual tool, but also a carrier of visual language—it combines belief, image, and energy, becoming an important medium for studying ethnic culture and spiritual world. Jiama images often print symbols such as spirits, birds and beasts, natural landscapes, which are both symbols of the Bai cosmology and a symbolic system for communication between humans and nature, humans and deities.

The artistic expression of Jiama has strong connections with primitive art expression, and is a kind of conceptual image. Jiama images are substitutes for objects themselves, and also symbols. As Susanne Langer said, “In art, form is abstracted only to become visible, and form breaks away from its usual function only to gain a new function—to serve as a symbol to express human emotions.”

Jiama art is also a form of communication through images—spiritual dialogue between people and “Benzhu” (ancestral spirits, guardian gods). People burn Jiama to make the images on paper become a medium to another world. This ritual is both an extension of language and transcends language; it completes communication through “bodily action.”

When I understood this, I found that Jiama connects with my previous research:

• Fei Xiaotong’s “field” is the relationship between society and culture;
• Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh” is the relationship between body and world;
• Jiama ritual is the relationship between humans and the spiritual world through material action.

The three form a continuum, from external to internal, from rational to perceptual, from language to ritual.

In my painting, I combined the formal language of Jiama with ritual elements of Bai culture, such as burning, incense, eggs (all items used in Bai Benzhu worship, symbolizing life, cycle, and communication), while extracting their forms. Abstraction reproduces the spiritual elements of concepts, emotions, and experiences carried by symbols themselves in the name of design, most fully presenting the symbol’s expression of emotion and meaning, and extending into new meanings. Abstraction allows symbols to influence and interact with each other, and through recombination and recreation to express visual symbolic forms of symbolic spirit.

These symbols are not directly reproduced, but “translated” on the canvas into part of image energy. Through painting, I interweave these ritual elements with personal experience and bodily perception, making the work have both the spatiality of “field” and the perceptuality of “flesh.”

I also combined Jiama and tarot cards because they both externalize internal energy through images. But I did not include the burning process. As I mentioned before, tarot itself can communicate through images, while Jiama images directly manifest the internal. They are both rooted in the creation of substitutes through image making.

In the “In-Between”: Mutual Generation Between Me and Culture

Looking back at the whole process, I find myself always in the “in-between.” Neither a complete insider nor a complete outsider. I understand Bai culture with the thinking of external culture, and am also drawn by the complexity of Bai culture. This “in-between state” is actually the core of my creation. It is not a predicament, but a generative force.

Through painting, I establish an “intermediate space” where language, body, belief, history, and perception interweave. The work becomes a living system, a flowing “field.” In this field, there is no fixed meaning, only constantly generating energy relationships. My painting is no longer expressing “who I am,” but presenting “how I co-exist with my Bai culture.”

Through the research and creation of Unit 3, I gradually understand that art is not only expression, but also a way of reconnecting. It connects language and body, ancestors and present, local belief and personal consciousness. Art is a “visualized translation” that allows emotion, energy, and perception to flow again in the gaps of language rupture.

I believe painting can become a ritual of communication. It is not just visual, but bodily, spiritual, and emotional. It is a translation tool between me and Bai culture, and also my method of re-understanding “self” and “cultural co-existence.”

From “field” to “flesh,” from tarot to Jiama, from language to ritual, my creative path has always been exploring the same question—when language fails, how can we still perceive, resonate, and co-exist with our culture.

About the author

Zhenrui Yang graduated from MA Fine Art: Painting at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London in 2025.