Meditation in Contemporary Landscape

 Seven Asian Artists

Luchia Meihua Lee

Humans follow earth, earth follows heaven, heaven follows Tao, and Tao follows Nature.               -Lao Tse

Wise people enjoy water while compassionate people enjoy mountains.  – Confucius.

The words for mountain and water (Shan山 and Shui 水) together mean landscape in Chinese.

Meditation in Contemporary Landscape features the work of seven artists of Asian heritage who live in the United States. The artist - Cui Fei, Kit-Keung Kan, Kay H. Lin, Takayo Seto, In-Soon Shin, YoYo Xiao, and Chin Chih Yang – each present their home countries of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China. They work in painting, photography, installation, digital art, and video art to capture the spirit of landscape in a contemporary context by using traditional and modern visual language and idioms to express their ideas. This exhibition intends not only to bring art to the viewer, but also to provoke a transformation of mind through consideration of these works. The exhibition invites  viewers to rethink the natural world that we sometimes take for granted, and brings an awareness of the relationship between nature and humanity.

Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism provide context for traditional Asian landscape art. (Figure 1)[1] The rich tapestry of ancient Asian culture was formed by these three schools of thoughts, which evolved separately in different regions of the continent – Taoism in China; Buddhism first in India, and then Confucianism in China and then in Korea; Buddhism in Japan; and Confucianism in Korea. Confucius’s Analects celebrated the importance of family and society structure, which become the discipline and aim of Korean culture and formed a comprehensive organizing principle for Korean society. In Japan, a branch of Buddhism was transformed into the splendor known as Japanese Zen Buddhism, a living philosophy that is directly reflected in Japanese daily life and practice. Taiwanese have long blended their disparate South Pacific Islander and Han Chinese backgrounds, as well as the numerous colonial influences (Spanish, Dutch, Chinese, and Japanese) that shaped ordinary life style and led to today’s synthetic culture which is a fusion of Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and folk religion. It is worth pointing out that in China, Taoism had the most profound influence on landscape painting and artistic culture, with its concept of the unity of nature, humans, and earth.

Asian cosmology is rooted in an understanding of ancient Tao, the basis of which is the text Tao Te Ching by Lao Tse. It explains the structure of the universe by allusion to a single mysterious creator and two underlying and opposite principles of the universe-yin and yang. Yin is found wherever there is fluidity, softness, openness, receiving, emptiness, or darkness; Yang is present in hardness, assertiveness, force, the basis and light. It is in the tension and interaction of these two principles that all things are generated. Taoism teaches that the void - the unknowable that cannot be named or described - is the source of life and the deepest understanding.

The landscapes in the exhibition are not constrained by the need to be representational, and their creators can devote themselves to harmonizing the effects of light, composition, background, and balance to make an artistic statement. Asian landscapes are meant to engage the viewer in a way that gives the painting an experiential value. By exploring the painting in detail and using his or her imagination to supplement it, the viewer takes a tour of the scene represented.

Kit-Keung Kan  uses traditional Chinese brush and ink to express the rhythms of water landscape painting, but provides a fresh perspective by focusing on a small portion of his nominal subject. He calls to mind, without picturing it, the mountain behind the movement of water.

YoYo Xiao took a picture of environmental desecration – in plain words, trash – and digitally processed it until he arrived at calligraphic strokes which outline a seemingly natural landscape. In other digital work, he generated clouds of smoke curling in the air, some of which metamorphose into human form.

Cui Fei, achieves a delicate beauty by keenly arranging rose thorns into a sensitive and defensive pattern. Her Six Steeds from ZhaoLing mixed media work series is inspired by the story of Chinese Emperor Taizong, who commissioned sculptures of six steeds. Two were stolen and now are on view in the Philadelphia Museum while the remaining four were badly damaged in transit to the Hangzhou Museum. It is the artist’s intention to address the general human condition of vulnerability and our inability to control the world – a world where even an emperor’s desires can’t always be fulfilled.

Korean artist In-Soon Shin is concerned with landscapes of the mind. Her pieces are abstract, yet organic.  They are nonrepresentational, yet at the same time are dynamic and easily lend themselves to allusion. They allow you to walk through the forest, where his or her mind takes in patterns and colors.

Takayo Seto focuses on the essential qualities of spirit and contemplation. Her work demonstrates a quite simplicity, a solid color image into which intrudes a brush stroke from one corner that may be a small branch, bird, or figure. The entire canvas leads you in a tranquil, spiritual world.  

Kay H. Lin’s poetic paintings contain her written paeans to Nature, thus taking an external perspective on emotion. This is reminiscent of the literati discussing ideas in complete freedom while mingling with Nature. Her work has the impressionist’s color of Monet and the Chinese literati’s idealization of Nature - all from a contemporary viewpoint.

Chin Chih Yang deconstructed traditional landscape by use of a modern, site-specific installation using recycled aluminum cans and LEDs. Most of the population, after all, lives in urban settings. In this urban landscape, Yang reminds us to pause to meditate in order to survive. Yang transforms his isolated space into an urban mountain and water landscape, and keeps with his longtime role as a protector of the environment.Yang Once placed huge ice cubes in New York’s Union Square in the high heat of summer and let the ice melt. He also created a globe with plants inside and documented their growth. He aims to raise awareness by taking action through art events to express his love of Nature, and all human kind.

Taoist landscape painters employed unpainted space as a vital part of their compositions. The core of Tao lies in a philosophic and religious conviction that emptiness and non-action are the key tools to reach an explanation of the origin of the universe, the structure of the universe, and the best path for human life.[2] Frequently, traditional landscape artists leave a large blank area in center of the painting, Invoking an axiom of the genre that blank space is not emptiness.[3] One function of this space is to allow viewers to take a metaphorical breath and meditate on the scenery from a distance.  To Kit-Keung Kan, that white part is a wave in the ocean; the waterfall is water jumping through the air. It is motion, neither weak nor smooth; it is the forces of nature, and inspiration. To Cui Fei, it is breathing space, a room to rest and to prepare notes and words. For In-Soon Shin, this blank is a break to go to next transformation, or  transcendental moment. To YoYo Xiao, it is grasping the thunderstorm, a view of intersecting tree trunks, or a droplet inching down a lotus stem.  

Landscape’s (Shan-Shui) tour classically involves visual travel along a mountain path, perhaps including a river, a hut, men walking along the path, or literati playing chess, tasting tea, or just discussing ideas.  There are flat panels with solid color backgrounds, Takayo Seto’s paintings are like minimalists walking the path that conceptualists inspired. A new sprout has stretched and broken out of the ground. The earth is also still in the process of awakening.  Or the meditator meets the light of a Zen master who brings a message of enlightenment. Kay H. Lin’s abstract empty space is hiding between the layers of color. It is literati reading a poem in the garden pavilion, and a classical young lady staring at the back garden from her attic with her mind drawn back to ancient times. For Chin Chih Yang, it is a courtyard or plaza area in between the high rises and skyscrapers. This is the freedom of mind that brings rest in the pandemonium of hard working days.

This meditation celebrates the long and ever-evolving relationship between nature, landscape, and us. Just as the original harmony between Nature and mankind gives way to alienation, so too the role of landscape is continually being redefined.  Nature has never stopped inspiring art and artists, but the expression of that inspiration has radically shifted as artists utilize modern language and idiom. This is more than simply a change in artistic fashion. Contemporary attitudes towards nature are colored by the realization that, for the last few centuries, mankind has been more and more successful at dominating and controlling nature. As Yang points out most directly, this success is now open to serious question.

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[1] Song Dynasty painting in the Litang style illustrating the theme "Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism are one". It depicts Taoist Lu Xiujing (left), official Tao Hongjing (right) and Buddhist monk Huiyuan (center, founder of Pure Land) by the Tiger Stream. The stream borders a zone infested by tigers that they just crossed without fear, engrossed as they were in their discussion. Realizing what they just did, they laugh together, hence the name of the picture, Three laughing men by the Tiger stream. Source: from National Palace Museum, Taipei   www.npm.gov.tw

[2] Cliff G. Mcmahon, The Sign System in Chinese Landscape Paintings, The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.1 (2003) 64-76

[3] Hunt, Anthony, Singing The Dyads: The Chinese Landscape Scroll and Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End. Journal of Modern Literature - Volume 23, Number 1, Fall 1999, pp. 7-34

Curatorial Essay for the exhibition

Meditation in contemporary Landscape, 2010