Critical reflection
While Lucretius in the first century bc wrote of matter and void and stated that ‘everything is riddled with emptiness’, believing that ‘if there were no emptiness, nothing could move’, throughout the centuries science has been more concerned with matter than with emptiness (Stallings，2007，p.13). Yet as twentieth-century scientists were investigating matter and form, they increasingly discovered indeterminacy and emptiness. Einstein’s famous equation e = mc2 signposted the path into uncertainty, a path already marked by inevitable randomness and decline in a world governed by entropy.As a result, much of the most contemporary philosophy today is engaging with the dialogue with science. Thus, most contemporary philosophies today are in dialogue with science, as is the study of ‘emptiness’.
Peter Higgs, who passed away in April this year (2024) and who predicted the existence of a boson that attracts other particles and thus creates mass, just like the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle of the Standard Model of particle physics.The discovery of Higgs boson particle predicts an invisible field pervading space, and suggests that matter and the forces that control our existence arise from their interaction with empty space, confirming ‘the notion that seemingly empty space may contain the seeds of our existence’ (Krause, 2012).Perhaps a good illustration of this, which is also an illustration of the similar relationship between emptiness and interdependence – the dependent origination of Early Buddhist thought – is that of scientists sitting at a table, which they know is full of waves and particles in space at the quantum level, yet they trust its solidity as a surface on which to write. As with philosophy, it is these relatively recent changes within science itself that have resonated with emptiness. As reality appears evermore strange to our everyday view, phi losophy and science are perhaps becoming close (Watson，2014，p.98).
The understanding and expression of emptiness is iterative in my creative process, which is also a shift in my understanding of dependent origination. In the previous unit, I used the experimentation with fluid media as an entry point to the understanding of emptiness, and felt from literature and theory of self as Siddhartha's experience of revelation and enlightenment in flowing water. In this unit, I discarded all expressive methods of adding personal experience to specific objects, and tried to open a new sense, or rather, a sense that is less accustomed to and has not been deliberately trained to discover and perceive. Because I clearly feel that we live in a deterministic universe, but our knowledge is presented in the form of probability. Our system of knowledge comes from the ego senses, yet this system of reality does not contain the slightest knowledge about the senses themselves.
The Buddha’s new understanding of self and reality presented it as without permanence, constructed and compounded, yet not as non-existent. The way the self and all phenomena come into existence is termed paticca samutppada, or dependent origination. Everything that exists does so in dependence upon a network of causes and conditions. Underlying all the teachings is this central doctrine of dependent origination (Boston,1995,p.238).This is also the concept that I want to give to the work: the existence of everything depends on a series of causes and conditions, including the so-called ‘emptiness’.
Being#3, 2024, 94 x 64 cm, lithography on kozo paper
Quasi-feu le romantisme by Max Ernst, 1960,
33.2 x 24.3 cm, oil on canvas
Les Peupliers by Max Ernst, 1939,
38.5 x 28 cm, oil on canvas
Untitled by Yu Youhan, 1988, 156 x 129 cm, acrylic on canvas
Being#1, 2024, 90 x 64 cm & Close up
Lithography on paper
In addition to the artist and writer Muxin mentioned in the previous unit, the artist Max Ernst has also inspired me a lot in the creation of textures. His paintings created using the technique of decalcomania, the paint winds, curls and forms signs and symbols. In addition, he created many abstract symbolic texts and interpreted them in this way: Just as now and then a star emerges from the host - as a moving planet, as a comet - so also does a cipher, whose ideogram becomes intelligible to us, rise up now and then from the heap of incomprehensibility. One could draw the conclusion that the limits of vision correspond to the limits of understanding (Schamoni & Ernst, 1974,p.75). This deepened my understanding of abstract paintings, just as the flashes of recognisable content in them when gazing at them are based on audiences' cognitive, experiential associations and understandings.
A typical example is the different feedback I received during the Being series exhibition at Copeland Gallery. Some people saw coral and landscapes, some saw cells and foetal conception, and some directly asked me if I have Buddhist beliefs. However, any of the above elements were not planned when I was creating the works. With the intention of feeling emptiness, I was able to create a different reality in the eyes of others, isn't this the natural way of illusion of all things? This discovery came as a great surprise to me and I realised that this was a good entry point to understand emptiness, paving the way for the next creation.
In Unit 3, I would like to continue the ideas found in this unit and create art that has a certain sense of stability, conceptual art without personal views. Like the existence of the emptiness of dependent origination, I want my work to be inclusive, peaceful, harmonious and compassionate, allowing different people to see different things in it. At the end of this unit I experimented with gold leaf and AI videos on my original prints, which allowed me to discover the transformation of a two-dimensional plane into a three-dimensional one (even if visually), and opened up a new line of thought on the philosophy of emptiness, which minimises the notion of ‘I’. I will continue to dig deeper along these lines, researching theories beyond science and philosophy and artists in the field of new media, and look forward to making new connections in the cross-disciplinary study of emptiness.
Being#4, 2024, 94 x 64 cm, lithography on kozo paper
The Being series is my exploration of the emptiness of dependent origination, and is partly inspired by the idea that ‘most of the universe is empty’ in physics: everything in the universe is made up of atoms, and atoms are over 99.9 per cent empty space (Cox, 2012). In the process of creation, apart from retaining my aesthetics of white space and a small amount of artificiality in the choice of fluidity media, I try my best to preserve the originality of the process of presenting the works. Sometimes, subconscious human action is unavoidable, but what I can do is to ‘do something’ when I am aware of my ‘doing something’ - to erase the traces of artificiality over and over again, so that the process of creation infinitely tends to be closer to the subjective consciousness of ‘no-self’.
From time to time, I have been thinking about how to judge when to stop in the process of creation, because time and time again, I would present a new effect by applying the brush. Until I read the answer of abstract ink artist Zhang Hao in an interview, which gave me some enlightenment: ‘Every time I create, this brush goes down, when to stop, it's not my subjective decision, but it's my emotion that says it's time to stop, just like Chinese opera, their babbling and chanting never stops, that's because their emotion is not expressed, when the emotion is expressed, then stop the matter (2024).’ Here, I understand his “emotion” as a kind of inner “intention”, which is exactly the concrete expression of the saying, ‘the mind that should be free of all obstacles’ and it also initiated a phase in which I became more alert to my original intention and controlled the rhythm of my creations more from my heart than from my reasoning.
As in the later works of the Being series, the concept of ‘emptiness’ began to become my mental attitude of ‘give and take’.If emptiness in Buddhism is a philosophical term referring to the dependently originated nature of phenomena, in Taoism it refers more to the source of all, and to a psychological attitude and state of mind in which this can be realized, characterized by simplicity, non-willing, quietude and frugality.
Circle by Yu Youhan, 1986-8, 198.2 x 198.4 cm, acrylic on canvas
The works of artist Yu Youhan resonated deeply with me. From his works, I not only saw the intuitive expression of the Tai Chi philosophy of yin and yang lines, but also the use of his extremely oriental ink and the ‘circle’ as the main image of the picture, which made me realise the subtle cultural influences that I hadn't paid much attention to in my own creations. The ‘circle’ is a prominent element in Yu Youhan's abstract paintings, and has gradually enriched into his unique abstract language. This series of works takes ‘circle’ as the main body, and uses dots and lines as brushwork in an unconventional way. The black and white circles are derived from the tradition of landscape painting since the Song and Yuan dynasties and the grey-toned tiled houses of Jiangnan, while the gradual addition of coloured circles is intended to experiment with more aesthetic possibilities. When talking about his ‘Circles’ series, Yu repeatedly refers to Lao Tzu's inspiration to him, ‘Tao gives birth to one, two to two, two to three, and three to everything’, as a metaphor for a certain essence of the world and the universe. He hopes that his circular symbols are not only a symbol of the essence of the universe, but also a manifestation of the spirit of the universe, and a statement of his personal ideals.
What makes me feel more in common is not only the use of ‘circle’ as the main image of the picture, but also the Tai Chi philosophy of yin lines and yang lines, which is exactly the concept that I want to express in my prints, the repulsion and intermingling between water and oil. The images generated by the prints correspond to the long and short strokes in Yu's paintings, and the concept of dependent origination may have been expressed in a similar figurative way at this moment:
When this exists, that comes to be;
With the arising of this, that arises.
When this does not exist, that does not come to be;
With the cessation of this, that ceases (Nanamoli and Bodhi, 2002, p.655).