Before equal temperament became standard, keyboard tuning carried an error that no tuner could remove: stack twelve pure fifths, and the cycle never closes exactly on the note where it began. The discrepancy could be moved but never eliminated, and one common solution was to push all of it into a single fifth. When played, that interval wavered so harshly it seemed to howl. It became known as the “wolf fifth”, and musicians learned to steer around it.
Bill Wangyi’s sculptures are built around a similar remainder: the gap between the wish to live forever and the body that can never fulfil it. He works mainly in lacquer (大漆), the sap that seeps from the lacquer tree when its bark is cut. Up close, it gives off a faint smell found in nothing else. Once exposed to air, it oxidises and slowly darkens to a dense, ink-like black. Through shaping, carving, sanding and lacquering, he brings creature-like forms into being.
His recent works take the Daoist idea of everlasting life as their starting point. The alchemical furnace was once the central instrument of xiuxian (修仙), the cultivation of immortality; in it, adepts refined the elixirs they hoped would let them escape death. It was the longing for life that gave rise to xiuxian, and from the Tang and Song dynasties onwards, internal alchemy went further still: it took the human body itself as the “cauldron and furnace” and cultivated the “golden elixir” within. The artist strips this body-as-vessel of its xiuxian narrative and places these forms, bare, throughout the space. Their black stillness makes viewers instinctively keep their distance. There is a solemnity to them, as if they were waiting for the viewer to feel something close to facing death. Yet incense smoke wavers out of small openings in the sculptures, as though they were breathing. The smoke breaks the stillness, and a sense of life slowly returns.
Each work is built up slowly, layer upon layer, through time and meticulous handwork, in a process that itself resembles xiuxian. Like fifths stacked towards a cycle that never closes, the layers reach for a completion that never quite arrives. On close inspection, the vessels bear traces of the life that made them. The wish to shed the body as a cicada sheds its shell (蝉蜕), to grow feathers and rise as an immortal (羽化登仙), is enacted again and again, but in the end it is no more than the Yellow Millet Dream (黄粱一梦), the old tale of a man who lives out a whole life in a dream before his millet has finished cooking.
The artist draws on a Buddhist distinction, central to Yanagi Sōetsu’s thinking on craft, between self-power (自力), liberation through one’s own effort, and other-power (他力), what comes from forces beyond the self. For Yanagi, other-power was where the beauty of craft came from. Here, it is also where powerlessness becomes visible. The sculptures express a reverence for self-power and for life, yet the marks that other-power has left on them, without the artist’s willing it, are evidence of a resistance to death that has come to nothing. Like the wolf fifth, this remainder cannot be tuned away, only moved. Musicians learned to steer around it; Bill Wangyi places it in the middle of the room.