空空空
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| 空空空. (2019) Chinese Ink on Rice Paper. Size: 140cm x 70cm, |
Catalogue Essay
Scripture, Emptiness, Gesture: The Dialectics of “空”
At first glance, the work unfolds as a diptych: to the left, dense columns of calligraphic script; to the right, a single monumental gesture, abstract yet animal-like, suspended between body and void. Bridging the two is a single character: 空 — emptiness, the void, the ineffable heart of Buddhist thought. This visual conjunction — text, word, gesture — enacts one of the deepest paradoxes in East Asian philosophy: that emptiness is not the absence of being, but the ground from which being itself arises.
The Left Panel: Language and the Discipline of Meaning
The left half of the composition is filled with the sutra text. Each character is articulated in a rhythm that oscillates between control and release. The brush moves deliberately, maintaining coherence but occasionally straying into expressive freedom. The result is a surface that embodies both the discipline of scripture and the fragility of interpretation.
In psychoanalytic terms, the left panel represents the symbolic order: language, law, tradition, the domain in which knowledge and identity are inscribed. The artist situates us here deliberately, reminding us of the long lineage of Buddhist writing — centuries of copying, transmitting, memorizing. Yet within this repetition lies tension: the more scripture attempts to contain truth, the more it risks covering it over with forms.
The Pivot: 空 (Emptiness)
Then comes the rupture. One large character, 空, interrupts the script. It is not absorbed into the flow but marked apart, monumental, almost defiant. Philosophically, this is the sutra’s punchline — 色即是空，空即是色 (“Form is emptiness, emptiness is form”).
Visually, 空 destabilizes the viewer’s eye. It is as if the calligraphy pauses, breathes, and invites us to step beyond the net of words. This is the moment of insight, the sudden break that Zen masters call satori.
The emptiness is not nihilism. In Buddhist thought, 空 is the recognition that all things are interdependent, without self-nature. It is a productive void: absence that allows presence, silence that gives meaning to speech.
The Right Panel: Gesture as Embodiment of Emptiness
To the right, the brush explodes into a radically different mode: bold, gestural strokes that could be read as a horse, a figure, or pure abstraction. Unlike the text, this image does not instruct; it confronts us with immediacy.
This is emptiness taking form again, 空即是色. If the left panel is the domain of discourse, the right is the domain of gesture and embodiment. The brushstroke here is performative, echoing the body of the artist — shoulder, breath, wrist. Each sweep registers motion and silence, matter and void.
Art-historically, this resonates with both Zen calligraphy (Hakuin’s explosive “無”) and Western Abstract Expressionism (Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell). Yet it is not imitation; it is the artist’s own staging of emptiness as lived movement.
Philosophical Resonances
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Buddhist Thought: Prajñāpāramitā sutras stress that ultimate truth cannot be grasped by language. The Heart Sutra itself is a text that gestures beyond text — and here, the artist literalizes that paradox.
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Daoist Influence: Daoist aesthetics emphasize the void (wu 無) as the fertile space from which spontaneity (ziran 自然) emerges. The leap from text to gesture embodies this principle.
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Psychoanalysis: The left side represents the symbolic (law, scripture), the center emptiness as a rupture, and the right side the return of the real — raw presence that exceeds codification.
The Artist’s Intention
The artist is not merely copying a sutra. He stages a ritual drama:
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Immersion in the inherited text.
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Breakthrough into emptiness (空).
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Re-entry into the world as liberated gesture.
This is less a representation than a performance of enlightenment. The work enacts, in ink and space, the very cycle described by the Heart Sutra: from form to emptiness to form again.
Conclusion
This piece stands as both scripture and anti-scripture. It honors tradition while cutting through it. It demonstrates emptiness not by describing it, but by forcing the viewer to experience its oscillations: the density of text, the sudden rupture of 空, the liberation of gesture.
Like the sutra itself, it teaches not through meaning but through shock, rhythm, and presence. In this way, the artist situates himself in a lineage that bridges Buddhist wisdom, Daoist naturalism, and the modernist search for raw immediacy.
Exhibition Wall Text
空: Emptiness Embodied
This work stages a journey through scripture, silence, and gesture.
On the left, dense sutra calligraphy represents tradition and the discipline of language. At the center, the single character 空 — “emptiness” — interrupts, recalling the Heart Sutra’s revelation: Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. To the right, the brush bursts into bold abstraction, a gesture that embodies emptiness not as absence, but as living presence.
The composition enacts a cycle: from text, to void, to pure gesture. It is not only a visual work but a performance of insight, where words dissolve and emptiness becomes visible as movement.
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