I. Tracing Art: An Experiment in Art Democratization in the Postmodern Context

The "death of the author" and "birth of the reader" prophesied by Roland Barthes in The Death of the Author find material validation in Ni Weihua’s tracing practice. By transforming urban ruins into a public canvas, tracing art constructs a decentralized field of artistic production. This practice not only deconstructs Joseph Beuys’ utopian vision that "everyone is an artist" but also achieves a paradigm shift from symbolic empowerment to material empowerment through the topological manipulation of biological traces.

II. The Triple Construction of the Empowerment Mechanism

1. Participatory Empowerment: The Democratic Production of Original Code IP

The core of tracing art lies in the open architecture of its original code IP. The zero-threshold participation model designed by Ni Weihua essentially constructs a "de-skilling" system for artistic production. When ordinary participants reproduce natural traces on the walls of urban ruins with pigments, they simultaneously achieve a triple identity transformation: shifting from art consumers to producers, from spatial onlookers to co-constructors, and from symbol receivers to meaning-makers. This transformation is reinforced by the randomness of visual blind boxes—each participant is endowed with an irreplicable "artistic fingerprint". As Roland Barthes put it: "The birth of the reader (participant) implies the death of the author, but more importantly, it signifies the rebirth of a new subject."

2. Spatial-Political Empowerment: The Topological Rebirth of Ruins

As the primary field of tracing art, urban ruins undergo a re-encoding of their temporality. When the linear time of the city overrides individual existence, tracing art constructs a non-Euclidean space on the surface of ruins through the topological manipulation of biological traces. This spatial production carries a dual political nature: on the one hand, it dissolves the power hierarchy of urban space through the superposition of traces; on the other hand, the infusion of individual warmth transforms cold concrete walls into carriers of memory. As Henri Lefebvre put it: "Space is political, first and foremost it is a tool of power." Precisely through the democratic distribution of traces, tracing art achieves the reverse domestication of spatial power.

3. Paradigm Shift of the Pop Spirit

Ni Weihua’s early appropriation of readymades in his Pop art practice evolves into a direct topological engagement with natural forms in tracing art. This transformation is not a mere replacement of mediums, but a deepening of the artistic spirit of interrogation. While Andy Warhol dissolved the sacredness of art through screen printing, Ni Weihua redirects the object of interrogation to the mechanism of artistic production itself by means of the raw replication of natural and biological traces. His principle of "only following traces, never creating them" forms a mirror image of Pop art’s "cult of readymades"—the former achieves empowerment by negating creative sovereignty, while the latter completes deconstruction through the consumption of readymades.

III. The Ontological Subversion of Art Genetics

1. Contemporary Translation of the Homology of Calligraphy and Painting

The exploration of the trace-sign issue in tracing art is essentially a contemporary activation of the traditional Chinese notion of the homology of calligraphy and painting. While traditional literati pursued "vital rhythm in spirit and form" through brush and ink, Ni Weihua deconstructs such metaphysical pursuit by replicating natural textures in adherence to the principle of "only following traces, never creating them". Its operational logic implicitly aligns with Shi Tao’s ontological theory of the "single-painting method", yet pushes the tenet of "brush and ink must follow the times" to the material dimension of ruin aesthetics. This translation is not a mere formal imitation, but a replication of natural forms through the randomness and contingency of living organisms, thus subverting the creative concept of "conceiving the idea before wielding the brush".

2. Anti-Painting Painting Practice

The paradox of tracing art lies in its dissolution of painting itself through the act of painting. When participants cover wall surfaces with pigments, they simultaneously perform a dual operation: constructing traces on the material level and dissolving traces on the symbolic level. This reflexive practice enters into a trans-temporal dialogue with Yves Klein’s Void, yet the latter remains confined within the elitist framework of conceptual art, whereas tracing art achieves the democratization of anti-painting through universal participation.

3. Traces Becoming "Simulacra of Simulacra"

Ni Weihua’s easel-based works in the tracing series are by no means simple visual games, but rather radical operations of "trace politics" mediated by oil paint. Through the violent juxtaposition of extreme contrasting colors and hard-edge delineation, he deconstructs the initial smudged traces into a paradoxical coexistence of materiality and symbolicity. At the moment when the biological strokes of the body "domesticate" natural cracks, it actually completes a fatal parody of the cybernetics of modernist painting: artistic production is transformed from the free creation of subjectivity into a ritual of passive transcription of pre-existing traces. Such "reverse simulation" in turn renders traces into "simulacra of simulacra", which not only dismembers the "myth of originality" in modernism, but also pushes the readymade logic of Pop art into the abyss of democratization—every participant is reduced to a transporter of traces and a tamperer of meaning, and the subjectivity of painting is completely disintegrated in collective transcription.

As acrylic paint reiterates the declaration of "the death of art" on the canvas, Ni Weihua precisely uses the most sophisticated painting grammar to prove that critical production itself has long since become an exquisitely preserved specimen recycled within the system. Those cracks intensified by extreme colors will eventually turn into tradable cognitive commodities under the logic of capital—which is perhaps the most pungent paradoxical footnote to the "end of art" thesis.

IV. Future Implications of Biolinguistics

1. Traces as the Language of Original Code

According to Sigmund Freud, all living organisms are driven by an impulse to return to an inorganic state, namely the death drive. Jean-Claude Fontanille further proposed the concept of the "life-death co-impulse", which is actualized through the innumerable repeated attempts of life instincts. The impulse toward repetition that artists experience when confronted with natural traces aligns precisely with this "life-death co-impulse" achieved by living beings through their instinct of repetition, thereby supplementing the inadequacies of biosemiotic theory. Through the tracing practice guided by the principle of "forming the mind without abiding anywhere", the experiencer renders natural traces visible as a language of original code, infused with the warmth of the human body. Each act of tracing carries the participant’s biological information (such as fingerprint pressure, movement trajectory), and the materialization of this information through pigment constitutes an anti-linguistic, non-semantic communication system. Unlike the technical memory described by Bernard Stiegler, this linguistic system realizes the material expression of Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the "body without organs" through the direct intervention of the human organism—removing the camera and turning the human body itself into a camera.

2. An Artistic Preview of the Post-Human Era

The principle of "only following traces, never creating them" in tracing art heralds a fundamental shift in artistic production in the post-human era. While AI painting generates images through algorithms, tracing art constructs an anti-algorithmic artistic ecosystem by leveraging the "instinct of repeated attempts" (Fontanille) of the human body to replicate natural biological traces in their raw form. This ecosystem does not constitute a negation of technology; instead, by returning to the most primitive production of traces at the boundary between organic and inorganic matter, it redefines the essence of art—art is not about innovation, but about the material testimony of embodied existence.

V. Conclusion: Tracing Art as a Paradigm Revolution in New Painting Aesthetics

Ni Weihua’s tracing art has accomplished a quiet aesthetic revolution through the triple deconstruction of empowerment mechanisms, art genetics, and biolinguistics. Its zero-threshold participation model deconstructs the power structure of artistic production; its topological manipulation of ruins reconstructs spatial politics; its language of biological traces heralds the artistic forms of the post-human era. While traditional painting remains trapped in the binary framework of "creation-appreciation", tracing art has pioneered a new era of artistic production through the original code methodology of "trace-following". This revolution is not a mere modification of existing paradigms, but a return to the embodied self and the most authentic materiality of art, pointing toward a new direction of bio-technological symbiosis for the future of painting.