Maleonn's Kingdom of Illusions

from Maleonn's What Love Is

You can still make magic with photography. Of course, you need more than Photoshop. Some hereditary talent never hurts. Maleonn's father was the head of the Shanghai Opera, his mother a famous actress. More importantly, a magician must maintain the imagination of a child. When his parents were sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, Ma Liang stayed behind, alone, and became Maleonn, child-mage, lord of a private universe. The words accompanying his work are his own.

Portrait of Mephisto

Mephisto said: you can only shape yourself by your own action. You must keep on creating. Only during the creation, the model of the mysterious beauty would recur. Everything has to start from nothing, from listening to the rhythmical sound in the darkness... You won't be able to be God of endless spiritual experience. The attracting mind, the saddest appreciation, the obsessed abhorrence, the pleasant disgust, all won't be able to change you. You'll finally find out: what you are will eventually be what you are...

Persons Never Existed

-About love, time, existence and disillusionment.

Cut off the pictures of the dead; set them up again in my lens;

Set up in the universe, in the eternal time of creation, just before 'now'

Please look at these lives that were carved into pieces of paper by time.

Tell me, are you scared?

What Love Is

Love is the wound
is the ravage of time
is intently watching of fantasy
is the lies
is a slowly winded line for an eternity

Love is the starry night
is the heavy-crown coronation of the whole world
is the reflection
is the crystal face
is the smoke swirling up the tearing land

Slave & Master

I'm the slave of my lens
And the master of my fable as well

The mask is my face, or it can be said I'm shooting myself.
I'm trying to control more, even plunder the face of the models

Sometimes I felt like that myself is the slave of my lens. Sometimes I was intoxicated with manipulating everything in my world. The relationship between photography and me is just like what between the world and us, manipulates and controls each other. In such entanglements and maltreatments, I felt satisfied with full of pain.

Book of Taboo

One page is birth, another is death; One is delighted, next is painful

One page is growth, another is aging; One is departure, next is terminus

One page is fantasy, another is truth; One is ode, next is sentence

One page is belief, another is doubt; One is establishment, next is subversion

One page is freedom, another is bondage; One is a carnival, next is the long-lasting loneliness after that

You're crying, poet: why you crying?

You shouldn't peep at life - the book full of sadness and joy.

-To our lives.

Days on the Cotton Candy

It's smoke and cloud
It's foam

It's huge sweetness and happiness expanded from a small spoon of sugar.

-To my life and fantasy

Amber

Amber

Memories killed by the time

and those little beetles' cruel but romantic fates

Leaves of Grass

Look at me, and remember me

Before everything shrivels, and turns into dust

Little Flagman

I dedicate the work

To the other side; and all the idealists who could face up to the disillusion.

To those art workers, my dear friends.

Second-hand Tang Poem

Far beyond my reach is the Enchanted Mountain,

And you are on the other side, ten thousand peaks away.

- Li Shangyin (Tang Dynasty)

Postman

He
Brings too many secrets
Decides not to talk any more

On a ruin of the memories
The guy is a deposed king
Silence, is the fate
Those undelivered letters together with all the addresses
During the time of unknown destination
Were sentenced to death

While in the pantomime of fate
Inside the man-in-green's bag
Buried my final stationery writing to you
And also, those in his eyes
Lines of verse as beautiful but toxic as the white oleander flowers in the spring

- Love is short, but longer than oblivion