A W o r d F r o m t h e A r t i s t

T s a o H s i a n g - F a

Like water my paintings flow, leaving behind no trace. Of void and white light are they made. Yet not only do they embody the essences of my skeleton, sinews and blood, skin surface and gut depths; they even think in synch with my breath and in resonance with my brain’s consciousness.

The nature of art is a connundrum. While in all honesty my knowlege of it is incomplete, if for that reason I weren’t allowed to share my feelings about it with others, I’d feel like a skyward-gazing frog-in-the-well endlessly wondering: Is the world really so infinitessimal as this? I can’t help but want to leap out of that well, touch the world outside and let the outside world get a good look at me. Showing my paintings to you, dear Friend, is my way of doing this.

What does it really mean to “study”? To seek in the pages of books or from the mouths of teachers knowledge of geography or history, of machines’ uses and capabilities, or of how birds build nests and rear their fledglings --- such may be called “study”. It is a mode of study whereby information is collected through plodding work and observation.

But isn’t there any other Tao of study? I believe there is: accumulation of interacting experience upon experience upon experience. I might, for example, perceive a boat as being in deep slumber upon a river, with the feeling that it is embracing its own shadow while lying serenely on the water. Wouldn’t you, as I, be impressed by such a perception as being a rather extraordinary experience?! And wouldn’t that experience lead you to anticipate feeling a similar sense of mysterious beauty and ecstacy the next time you saw that little boat? Actually, such feelings are stories authored by our own minds. Thus it is that I consider “experiences” to be the fruits of our brains’ industry, which repeatedly spring up in the guise of memories answering or resounding to thoughts. And so it is that I describe “thinking” as a resonance of accumulated experiences or memories without which we can’t grow—and that I sense my paintings to be embodiments of such a resonance or thinking.

We are ignorant of what real thinking consists in. For the most part, we only know how to replicate book information, appropriate second-hand experiences, and paste it all together with bits and peices of personal impressions. And it is this process which we incorrectly honor with the name “thinking”, whereas real thinking is a lively dance of energy engulfing us and manifesting ever-fresh shape-shifting images before us, lifting us up and empowering us to fulfill the responsibilities entrusted to us in life.

Now, therefore, let us open up our minds, and, with an aromatic tea in offering, invite thinking to enter therein and tarry for a spell.