Disruptor
Dai Weina
Translated from the Chinese by Liang Yujing (梁余晶)
Having meals is a tradition we must uphold.
Only the rainbow a good fit for my breakfast.
Dreaming is to lift the lid of the life being simmered.
In a destructive way, one is maturing fast.
Poverty and war slip into the body like antibiotics.
Some try all out to write tragic scripts for the offspring.
Men work together to fill the moon’s craters with lies.
This morning is pervaded with a fatigue from the massacre.
When the killing is over, innocence returns.
The thinker opens his eyes to dream—
in the showdown between the living and the dead,
he joins the side of the ghosts.
Before the shrine, I once begged the deities for advice.
I pleaded with my ancestors at their grave.
But one day, they were all chased away by the living.
Everybody walking to me, now, claims to be God.
I get lost, time and again, among faces.
Their mouths, throats, tongues: speaking of different meanings.
No memory. No conscience. No heat.
The sky puts down its dark curtain
like a life lost.
I, then, become the son of Voodoo.
Awakeness is but a deeper, unconscious sleep.
Civilization, ruins under construction.
Those trivial moments will vanish as the critical ones arise.
I vow to discard the age just in time
before it dumps me.
The world slaps us in the face.
Humans need to be spat on.
Yes, the artist is here to disrupt.
Other than Satan, who else can make God work?
Unconscious Dreams is a new body of work that unfolds across painting, sculpture, and poetry, forming an immersive environment where perception shifts between wakefulness and dream-state. The exhibition traces the subtle terrain between memory and imagination, where the self expands, dissolves, and recomposes through gestures of intuition. A poem becomes a guide: a keeper of language whose voice opens a threshold into the unknown. Within this portal, images rise like apparitions, shifting forms that carry the weight of migration, longing, and the unfinished work of transformation.
Manuel Mathieu’s works do not describe; they appear. They reveal how memory, movement, and cultural inheritance imprint themselves on the psyche, and how creation becomes an act of spiritual attunement. In Unconscious Dreams, this process expands into a dialogue with poet Dai Weina, whose words open a new interpretive space where image and poetry intertwine.
Presented by HdM Gallery in collaboration with poet Dai Weina.