Form/Content, and ways of some artists

 Still looking up mining, I try to look up art works. I come across the following:

West, Liu Xiaodong 2012

Liu Xiaodong and his team came to Xinjiang on 22 June 2012 and commenced the two-month “Liu Xiaodong’s Hotan Project” documenting the life of jade miners in the region known for reserve of the precious stone. Liu carried on with his unique way of live painting established while producing the Three Gorges Series (2004 –2005). He set up a temporary studio in his tent to accomplish this elongated project with sketches, diaries, oil painting and photography. A camera team was also present to document the entire progress with a film.

The art -work is interesting, but what I find more refreshing and interesting is the artist's process. Sketching, painting, diaries, photographs and the lived experience which goes on to inform his sensibility. Different time-span approaches (time to make the artwork) to the same subject matter. Also, different ways, from pencils to paints, to clicks to words noting, reflecting, weaving in something of his own in the work he pursues. 

I wonder how someone looks at such a work? How do you meet an audience, what form do you put your work in? Seems like that age-old question of form/content. And then this added layer of art for the joy of making, pursuit, the verb, or art as an object, the output? Personally, I struggle often with this question. Sometimes I feel the work finds its own momentum when the form/content question is resolved. (Not that it doesn't come up again while working, still)

But all that aside, the joy of creation, the joy of artist must be there in the approach that Liu Xiaodong follows - such immersion (!), any and all mediums, just the subject and the artist, and a way to note, see, understand, reflect and then again use that understanding to better note, see, understand, reflect - and so goes the itinerarnt, almost eternal (if it were not thankfully bound by our brief lives) artistic process.

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(As a corollary, the subject needs to be inexhausible. Almost like eternity of time, eternity of the subject. But then, most nature is. Some artists have found eternity in a single tree. Even a single object on this moving earth - changing lights and changing shadows is a new object every minute. But here, it is about the building of the artist as much as the artwork. Like nature's adaptation to the environment, both are formed by each other, responding to and building off, vibing off each other.)