The following text is a manifesto of the lessons learned during my stay in the People’s Republic of China between 1983 and 1990. In Peking, I studied traditional Chinese painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. As a foreigner coming to China to study Art from South America, the first thing is presumed is that there is an enormous cultural distance, to say the least. Perhaps this assumption is not so correct. As citizens of the world, we sometimes have more closeness than we might think. It is clear to me, that there is also room for enormous differences … which there are … but it must be said that similarities also exist. The fundamental questions about our existence have been asked and continue to be asked in all corners and cultures. That is part of the similarities. It is evident that the answers have not been the same and it depends a lot on the cultural niche in which we are located …… but … the more fundamental the question becomes … the closer and more universal the answer is.
It will be a compendium of what I think is and what was essential in the understanding of the oriental world in all its fields. You must understand that the time when I was there, the world was very different from today’s world in any of its aspects that you want to see. You must have a little cultural awareness to the time that we lived in those years. This is important to put us in context. We all know how the cultural universe of the homo sapiens society has changed since then. Therefore, I will touch on concepts rather than stories. I will formulate in a universal way my understanding of these concepts as they are mine today and not those of a particular country, region, or ism. I say they are mine in so far as they are formulated by my inner self and my experience. The concept that I consider most important in the cosmogony of that world touches what we can call the silence and the emptiness in the formulation of its cultural map… so much so that it is a concept that I believe the most important in the cosmogony of that world philosophical as well as artistic and I will refer to it as … Silence in Chinese painting. It is possible that the expression of the individual and collective imaginaries that weaved the web of the reality of that time were not at all like the way I approached and perceived it. Even so, this is what I saw… and this is how I understood it and lived it. Everyone sees, what they can and what they want if they are able to approach it.
This is the decoding I did of its map and its territory, and its formulation is like this.
Silence In Chinese Painting.
Chinese painting is a very important base in my academic formation and together with other concepts it sustains the personal, intellectual, and artistic framework of my current work. Since entering the field, we could advance in concepts of emptiness and silence; these are very close depending on what level of reading we want to conceptualize. In the edge of ancient Chinese culture before the nineteenth century, in the cosmogony and space that gives rise to the philosophical and artistic expressions that occurred in those times; a little distant in their history and for the case at hand that of traditional Chinese painting, these two concepts are fundamental. These encourage and are the core of this subtle and deep imaginary. They are an immense legacy and contribution to the history of ideas of all humanity, not only in the East but also in the West.
The human imagination has been nourished throughout its development by many fruits and today it is the result of all these harvests. We walk on the shoulders of many generations of ideas, concepts, and civilizations, each one of them with contributions that underpin today’s thinking. To say now that … reality only exists when we measure it or what is the same … it only exists when we imagine it … or when we name it … or when we paint it, we are putting ourselves into the same place as the oriental mysticism of those times. Taoism is a parallel creation. Its essence is emptiness and acceptance. It can not be named because that immeasurable is no more, just as the mountain behind the mist tries to be in its never-ending path of change. The universe of a cup of tea inhabited by emptiness and only when we fill it then it is when we measure it … like a landscape of mountain and water painted on rice paper … where most of the space is seized by emptiness … the silence … that uncatchable mist … it melts in our hands … impossible to paint it … we see it but not. We measure it but it will never again have the same shape … it escapes … and nothing will ever be the same … it escapes everything. The glimpse of the mountain that barely hints will be the only “koan” that we will be able to describe … translate … invoke … measure … paint … relate … argue … and consider this is real … and then believe that we have understood it. But in this way, it was only an instant frozen by the painting, by the measurement… vain idea of believing that we have caught it. Reality flees like mist … the mountain inhabits the emptiness as tea inhabits the emptiness of the teapot … and to catch … that its appearance … is the essential … to live that silence … to feel that emptiness full of everything … to be observing that leaving to warp the fabric of the reality … to leave my reality being the silence in that emptiness where everything is and nothing is … to swim in the nothingness to be everything then the return will come to me and it is then the moment of the subtle and austere touch of the translation … made answer … made painting. It is the divination of the possible. to live it is one thing, and to understand is another. We understand it just when we come out of that emptiness … out of that silence … out of that fleeting contemplation. Here begins the construction of the answer our imaginary elaboration in simulation mode.
Anticipatory … here begins the painting … the mountain and the water … a map with reality membership … it’s our map the guide to navigate in a changing and topological territory … it is the mountain on which we ride. There was the emptiness … the silence … from which we extract the “koan” and the threads with which we pick the fabric of our imaginary reality. Art is installed as a decoded reading of emptiness and silence where everything … everything … is at the same time … it is too much … it is too much to name it, that unfathomable … we only manage to mention it in the form of a “koan”, in the form of a mountain, in the form of a fictitious story to be able to understand it. The rest we do not see because it is all at the same time. So, reality … it only exists when we imagine it … when we measure it … when we name it … when we paint it. Reality is silence in a state of evaporation … in the form of imaginary. Art is therefore an imaginary measurement of the empty. that’s what we call reality. And that is what we paint and what we believe in.
The Chinese map of ancient times already indicated the importance of silence and emptiness. A long way to reach an imaginary summit and say there is nothing to say. We cannot name it. Not because it is disrespectful or because the sacredness of its halo prevents us from doing so … not simply because there are no stories or tales to tell … because it is unarguable … how can we explain everything at the same time … of our days we would say the sum of all the ways … how to argue it maybe with a mathematical toroidal equation x + x = x where 1 changes all the time.
The anecdote here has no space, it is back on the road the closer we are to silence, the more refined and austere is the workmanship… stay close … but without arriving the Chinese painting of Mountain and Water is installed there decoding in a language, as close as possible to that vibration of the almost nothing in this space, the anecdote has been purified and there is room only for the essential. The superfluous is no longer seen, is not felt, does not exist … it was mere pretense and noise silence settles near the top … on the edge of the immeasurable abyss … without making noise.
… Yet … the only alternative for us is to sing that silence with a shout perhaps… to argue the story … to paint the mountain … perhaps to make it exists in our own way. At the top … at the edge … there are no more arguments … there are no stories … there are no tales … there are no reasons … there everything is everything and nothing at the same time … space contracts everything happens at the same time and place we can transcribe the essential in a “koan” or in a painting where what happens as an arguable reality is a mountain and water in a subtle dialogue … the yin yang of the ephemeral. Then we are like miners extracting what is possible from that emptiness … from this silence to interpret it later as a symphony. The mist that configures its path of change in a space devoid of noise and full of mystery. Our stubbornness of wanting to extract from this abyss a pinch of reality … of mountain and to be able to shout it … to relate it … to paint it as if it were revealed truth or in the best of cases to assume it as our reality.
This is a feat that means giving reality to the ephemeral insubstantiality of emptiness and silence. Ultimately, reality exists only at our scale and only if we imagine it. Creating reality out of nothing … what a feat… and believe it … and then live and die for it.