I Did Not Tell Half of What I saw

Within the legend of Marco Polo, there is a famous confession: “I did not tell half of what I saw.” While these words never appear in the main text of The Travels of Marco Polo, they were inscribed on his tomb after his death and have come to symbolise the entirety of his journeys. It is at once a confession and a declaration: language can never exhaust experience, and any narrative reaches only part of the truth. That “untold half” is where memory, illusion, and imagination truly begin.

Von Hellermann’s paintings unfold precisely within these fissures. Starting with historical narratives, she does not attempt to “reconstruct” or “replicate”. Instead, she works from her bodily perception and the flow of the subconscious, reshaping her own experience between imagination and reality. The “untold” becomes the point of departure for creation. Von Hellermann uses her brush to supplement images overlooked by history or filtered through culture—particularly those “Oriental” imaginings constructed by Western narratives. She does not seek to correct them, but to let them coalesce anew—through strokes that are blurred, humorous, absurd, and tender—recovering the complexity of history and emotion. In her work, the “East” is neither a romanticised wonderland nor the exoticized Other of colonial discourse, but a shifting state of unknown.

Within the galleries of the Sixi Museum, Sophie von Hellermann’s paintings drift like fragments of a floating dream. They echo across space as if forming different chapters of the same narrative, or an extended conversation about time, memory, and emotion. She writes luminous colours upon somber themes, and with airy brushstrokes, tells the weight of history. In these works, history does not exist as fact, but as a sensuous experience that is constantly rewritten. Just as Marco Polo’s travelogue oscillates between fact and fantasy, von Hellermann’s work operates in the interplay of seeing and imagining. Von Hellermann often says that her paintings are not stories, but spaces of emotion. The almost-human figures, time-worn landscapes, blurred faces, and fragmented architectures appear like visual remnants surfacing from the depths of memory. Her creative process is a spiritual journey—using herself as a vessel to traverse the boundaries of time and culture, transforming history into a landscape of feeling. What concerns her is not the beginning or ending of a narrative, but “the moments beyond narration”. This is painting at its most intimate and most open: where the viewer senses the artist’s own breath while being compelled to confront their own perspectives and biases. Every history bears its fissures, every act of seeing contains forgetting. And it is precisely within this “untold half” that art breathes—and thought unfolds.

“I have not told half of what I saw” is not merely an epitaphic confession, but a philosophical stance—a refusal to trust the totality of knowledge, narration, and seeing itself. The “untold half” belongs not only to Marco Polo, but to every viewer.