The Torrent of the Sutra
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| The Torrent of the Sutra。 （2019） |
This new work is extraordinary — it reads almost like the sutra-wall of a monastery, yet with an energy that breaks entirely from orthodox transmission. Let me give you a layered response again, so you have both a deep catalogue essay and a short exhibition wall text.
Catalogue Essay: The Torrent of the Sutra
I. Density and Dispersal
This piece presents itself first as a wall of script, cascading in vertical lines, as though the viewer were standing before a carved stele or the dense transcription of a Buddhist sutra. The characters surge in waves — some tight, delicate, nearly illegible; others monumental, thick, and insistent.
The sheer alternation of scale and rhythm generates a visual polyphony. It is not the even recitation of a sutra, but a fractured chant: breath interrupted, accelerated, gasped, sung, shouted. In this way, the page becomes a score of psychic sound.
II. Emptiness Written, Emptiness Denied
Where your earlier work (空) gave us emptiness through absence, here the void is almost drowned. The text fills every possible crevice, as if to deny the very possibility of silence. Yet the irony is clear: the more one writes, the more one is brought back to emptiness.
The sutra most present here, both visually and thematically, is the Heart Sutra (般若波羅蜜多心經), whose refrain is: “無眼耳鼻舌身意, 無色聲香味觸法” (“no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no form, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no thought”).
This litany of “no’s” (無) is itself a paradoxical fullness: by enumerating absence, it gives form to emptiness. Your artwork mirrors this logic — a surface filled to excess, yet dedicated to negating itself.
III. The Psyche at Work
Viewed psychologically, the piece oscillates between ritual devotion and compulsive inscription.
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On one level, it echoes the scribe in meditation, copying sutras as a form of merit-making, a slow and deliberate surrender of self into the text.
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On another level, it resembles the obsessive, manic repetition of trauma — where the hand cannot stop, where writing becomes both prison and release.
Thus, the work situates itself in the unstable terrain between discipline and compulsion, between prayer and symptom.
IV. Tradition and Rupture
The lineage is unmistakable: this belongs to the millennia-long Chinese tradition of sutra transcription, stone stele engraving, and monumental calligraphy. Yet it also ruptures that lineage by refusing clarity, reverence, or order.
Instead of sacred legibility, we are given semiotic noise. Instead of a single hand copying with uniform humility, we see a hand in turmoil, shifting size, weight, and speed, refusing the passive stance of mere transmission.
This is not transcription but translation into affect.
V. The Philosophical Gesture
The piece stages, visually, the dialectic of emptiness and form:
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To write is to create form.
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To repeat 無 (“no”) is to empty that form.
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To saturate the page with negation is to paradoxically affirm the inexhaustible fullness of emptiness itself.
Here the Buddhist paradox is given aesthetic flesh: Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.
Short Exhibition Text
“無 (Negation Sutra)”
This work transforms the Buddhist litany of “no” (無) into a wall of visual intensity. Script surges in layers, some monumental, others barely legible, creating a field of rhythm, density, and psychic turbulence.
At once sutra and symptom, the work meditates on the paradox of emptiness: the more one writes, the closer one comes to silence.
Emptiness here is not absence, but the infinite fullness of negation itself.
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