To reach that renowned independent art museum on the outskirts of Beijing, after getting off at the nearest bus stop, you have to walk three stretches. The first is an urban village. Its purpose, aside from providing supplies, is mostly to remind you that no matter how far you go, you’re still in this world. The second is an open meadow with windmills and low bushes; I call it “Chilechuan Grassland’s Beijing Branch.” It’s the kind of pure encounter you have with art for the very first time. Occasionally a plane roars low overhead. The last stretch is a narrow riverside road flanked by woods, with hardly any space left for pedestrians: this is the realm the museum inhabits. When the drone of one or two passing cars already drowns out the birch trees’ whisper, being an independent exhibition-goer seems even harder than being an independent curator. The exhibition-goer is required to be disappointed, disappointed by the five-kilometre trek and the ticket price, by a gallery no bigger than his own mind, by the fact that his online secondhand clothes aren’t quite decent enough. He is also required to flaunt his meagre art education, to speak eloquently, to forget the meadow he just crossed, to become that airplane showboating overhead, to go home and cook up something new that surpasses this exhibition, and then to passively wait for an invitation from a curator. The exhibition-goer’s troubles don’t end there: the show has only paintings, no food. Even the few pieces of fruit are painted ones, less substantial than the theories of Lukács. When he steps out of the gallery, mulling over the secondhand paintings in his head, chewing on those secondhand fruits, eyeing his own secondhand reflection, quoting secondhand epigrams to his friends about the experience, as a pair of secondhand Adam or Eve cast out of the garden, it no longer matters whether he wears secondhand clothes or cares who owned those objects first.