Ch’an Taoist thought and Adorno’s Aesthetic theory as critique of recent original landscapes

Swamp Studies: Impermanence and Resistance

These small landscape studies emerge from repeated contemplative encounters with the swamp behind my home. Working with ink and watercolor on rice paper, the aim is to allow the process itself, the drips and runs of the ink and watercolor, to become visible.

The swamp is not presented here as a scenic object for consumption, but as an entanglement of presence and absence: an organic enigma, at times dark. It is a site where form momentarily coheres and slips away. I am interested in how gestures can suggest life without fixing it, how a mark can be both a disclosure and a veil.

My landscape painting practice is shaped primarily by two influences:

• Ch’an (Zen) approaches to landscape embrace emptiness and non-attachment. In these paintings, negative space and the dark contrasts are the ground of being, they represent the metaphor for the dark enigma, the mystery out of which appearances arise and to which they return.

• Critical theory espouses, especially Theodor Adorno’s insistence, that authentic art must resist commodification; to refuse to be an alienated object; and refuse to reconcile contradictions prematurely. If one finds dissonance and incompleteness in these works, they are intentional and are what I believe to be part of their aesthetics. They are no longer to be reconciled. A key quality that Adorno assesses is the extent to which art refuses the consoling fantasy of nature as a harmonious spectacle, especially as we are witnessing 21st century’s exploitation of the flora and fauna, to the point of many animal extinctions, including a trajectory of our own extinction.

Each study is an exercise in creating, with non-identity—allowing the swamp to be what it is: unstable, opaque, and indifferent to our desire for clarity. My hope is that this practice can offer a small space of resistance against reification and resistance to being an instrument for consumption, or resistance from “culinary beauty.” Rather I invite viewers to ponder the mysteries, and at the same time, be more open to understanding while we witness the 21st century’s industrial and technological exploitation of the Goddess, Mother Earth.