Early Spring, Guoxi (1072)
Guoxi’s Early Spring is one of the most famous paintings from the Song Dynasty (960 — 1279 CE), and a leading example of the ‘monumentalist’ style of landscape painting. The viewer is invited to travel through the mountain landscape, beginning their journey in the lower foreground and slowly meandering up toward the mist-shrouded peaks. Guoxi painted this mountain scene from his imagination and, like most works of classical Chinese painting, he uses form much in the same way as calligraphers treat Chinese characters. Generalised images of trees, rocks, and waterfalls are infused with the master’s depth of personal expression. As viewers, we travel through a landscape that mirrors reality, yet which is entirely imbued with the artist’s emotional relationship and spiritual insight into wild places, nature, and the external world.
The meditative nature of Guoxi’s painting is captured by his son, Guoxu, who wrote about Guoxi’s painting routine: "On days when he was going to paint, he would seat himself at a clean table, by a bright window, burning incense to the right and left. He would choose the finest brushes, the most exquisite ink; wash his hands, and clean the ink-stone, as though he were expecting a visitor of rank. He waited until his mind was calm and undisturbed, and then began."
Fountain, Marcel Duchamp (1917)
In the early 20th century, Buddhism could only be accessed in the West through books and artwork. During this time, a loosely constructed idea of Buddhism circulated through the avant-garde, and influenced the way some understood Marcel Duchamp’s famous 1917 readymade sculpture ‘Fountain’.
The committee that organised the first exhibition in which Fountain was submitted refused to display it. So instead, Fountain was photographed by Alfred Stieglitz and published in a Dada Journal, The Blind Man, under the name ‘Buddha of the Bathroom’. Stieglitz spent time adjusting the lighting and camera angle until the shadow fell across the piece to suggest a veil, and so that the bulbous porcelain body resembled a seated Buddha.
Stieglitz wrote that: “The ‘Urinal’ photograph is really quite a wonder — everyone who has seen it thinks it beautiful — and it’s true — it is. It has an oriental look about it — a cross between a Buddha and a Veiled Woman.”
Second image: Ippitsu Daruma, attributed to Shokai Reiken (1315-1396)
Heech in a Cage, Parvis Tanovoli (2005)
“This work bring to life the Persian word heech, which means ‘nothing’. It is one of a celebrated series of sculptures made by the Vancouver-based Iranian artist Parvis Tanavoli (b. 1937). The concept of nothingness plays an important role in Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam. Heech represents the annihilation of the self, the final threshold along the path toward unity with God. Dynamically rendered in the sixteenth-century Persian nastaliq script, the word becomes animated, challenging the notion of nothingness.”
— Heech in a Cage, Parvis Tanavoli, British Museum.
Emptiness plays a fundamental role within both Buddhism and Daoism, but each tradition interprets it differently. In short, Buddhism suggests that nothing possesses the kind of substantial reality commonly assumed, whilst Daoism tends to understand emptiness as a distinct ontological reality, sitting just beyond manifest reality. In their separate ways, however, both traditions see existence as a complex dance between emptiness and manifestation, between being and non-being. I know little about Sufism, but I was so pleased to come across Heech in a Cage because I saw the same complex dance taking place, but within a completely different spiritual-cultural setting. In Sufism, it seems that the tension between being and non-being is interpreted primarily as self-direction versus annihilation of the self in God (fana). Within all these traditions, engagement with the ultimate, with emptiness however it is understood, has necessarily to be combined with our continued existence in the everyday world. I felt that this tension was beautifully captured, perhaps even reconciled, in this piece.