养 (Yang / Cultivation), 2019

 

养 (Yang / Cultivation), 2019
Chinese Ink on Rice Paper, 68 × 45 cm

The character 养, here written in its traditional form, becomes the axis of an expansive meditation on cultivation. Yet the word does not stand alone — it is buried, dispersed, fragmented among a sea of overlapping scripts. The viewer’s eye is drawn into a field where forms blur into one another, insisting on attention, interpretation, and patience.

text by Hamamoto Satoshi + Choo Meng Foo

The piece embodies a central paradox: to be cultivated is not to accumulate endlessly, but to refine, to pare away, to return to origin. Laozi writes:

“为学日益，为道日损。损之又损，以至于无为。”
(“In the pursuit of learning, one acquires daily;
In the pursuit of Dao, one loses daily.
Losing and losing, until one reaches non-action.”)

The practice of cultivation — 养 — is not about fullness but about subtraction, about constant renewal through emptying. Thus, the very difficulty of reading this dense text is the point: the viewer must lose themselves in the strokes before they can truly receive them.

养 as Practice

To cultivate is to repeat. Brushstroke after brushstroke, one achieves not perfection but presence. Just as a musician rehearses, a calligrapher cultivates not only the hand but also the mind and body — achieving a state aesthetically pleasing to the eye, harmonious to the ear, and fragrant to the spirit.

养 as History and Context

The work takes the logic of 满 (Fullness) further. Like T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, where fragments are shored against ruins, here each character is a fragment of history, a piece of inherited wisdom re-situated in the present. Each pictogram recalls a lineage — Confucian virtue, Daoist emptiness, Buddhist insight — yet in their overlapping they also point toward the future. This is not history as static monument but as living presence, a dialogue across time.

养 as Abstraction

Visually, the piece recalls Western abstraction — Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, where every mark is a gesture of immediacy. Yet Chinese ink brings a different dimension: each stroke contains 精气神 (jing, qi, shen).

• 精 (essence): the technical precision of the brush, the distilled mastery of craft.

• 气 (energy): the breath, the rhythm, the pulse of motion — alive in the way strokes thicken, break, or dissolve.

• 神 (spirit): the ineffable quality that transcends technique — the inner vitality that makes the work resonate.

In this sea of characters, essence, energy, and spirit flow together. The viewer is not simply “reading” but entering a field of force, a choreography of cultivation.

Personal Reflection

To me, the piece is not about clarity but about surrender. The repetition of 养 and its companions mirrors the daily work of self-cultivation — to write, to re-write, to lose, to regain. Just as the viewer searches for legibility among the strokes, so too does cultivation demand wandering and uncertainty. In getting lost, one discovers.

Thus the work insists: cultivation is not an end-state but an ongoing journey. Between past fragments and future possibilities, between fullness and emptiness, 养 reminds us that to be human is to practice — to tend not only our art, but our lives.

Exhibition Text

养 (Yang / Cultivation), 2019
Chinese Ink on Rice Paper

This work explores the traditional character 养 — to cultivate, to nurture. Buried among a dense field of words, the character asks viewers to search, read, and interpret.

Cultivation here is not fullness but refinement. As Laozi reminds us, “In the pursuit of Dao, one loses daily, until reaching emptiness.” Each stroke enacts practice, repetition, renewal.

Visually recalling both Chinese calligraphic tradition and Western abstraction, the work embodies 精气神 — essence, energy, and spirit. Characters dissolve into rhythm, history into presence, inviting the viewer to contemplate cultivation not as a goal but as an endless journey.