Rimi Yang
Once there was a lecture titled,"Transcending Duality."Well I do love duality in life.I do not want to transcend it.I just would like to celebrate it and dive into it. We live in this confusing world with a lot of dual elements: female and male, happiness and sadness, love and hate, black and white, light and dark, high and low, East and West, etc.If there is no female, there is no reason to being male.Like in William Blake's poems, when all people are rich and ever happy, and somehow the heaven sunk, and the hell starts surging.Somehow humanity can create the most beautiful and artistic songs, dance, or poetry by experiencing some hideous living situation in human history.Life surely does have duality.Thus, maybe East must meet West in the end.Actually as a cute infant I adored "Mary Poppins," Hollywood starts, and Disney movies. You might say, the world is in a beautiful balance, Yin and Yang, but for me, the world is just confusing.Confusing, but I surely love it.Seemingly purposeful life often does not make any sense.Nonsense.That is life.I think you cannot make any sense out of anything.That is life, yet we are born to fool ourselves to believe as if there are purpose, goals, etc.I reckon, this fooling ourselves is our true talent.We keep searching raison d'être, and find out there is no reason.We are born without any reasons.Just "be born."That is why life is so wonderful.If you have any static reasons, our life must be so boring.If I know what I paint beforehand, my painting must be too awful to describe. Thus this confusing act of describing my art in static words is quite nonsense, yet we want to be explained and to describe our art.Our mind searches for logic to settle our mind.Actually the world is simply just illogical.If you really are aware of it, you might become quite happy.It is very interesting for me to think that we can write about illogical, vibrant, and ever moving art with limited static words.That is why writing on Tao or "Koan," the Zen writing are written in nonsense manner by very much calm, wise, and trained Asian male monks.That must be the reason why I cannot understand any art criticism in art magazines.Now I get it.It should not be understood.That is very profound. Just as life is so confusing and chaotic, driving me crazy, frustrating, yet very joyful, then I really cannot think, yet keep thinking... My head is spinning, please stop me...., and then I hear, "gooooong, gooong" from the beautiful temple in Kyoto.The sound, just sound, no yin nor yang, just vibration, without any purpose nor reasons, yet somehow very soothing, makes me feel very calm, and slows me down, and I feel very clear in mind,then I question, "was that art?" Tao and "the Best Art" Shen Tusn-Ch'ien, one of old Chinese master painter explains Taoist thoughts about painting:the art form is perceived, in essence, as an act of creation, beginning in the formlessness of the Tao, transforming in time and pattern into creation: what is captured is a universe in miniature, a microcosm.The artist creates 'this wu-wei, not forcing the brush, not thinking discursively, but moving with sensitivity in the moment.In this way, painting becomes a form of meditation, a means of discovering union with tao, an accomplishment evident in the very best art.