Artist Statement

I vow, not until all of them have become Buddhas themselves, will I finally realize the Supreme Wisdom.

  ── Prabhacaksuh (Bright-Eyes) ⁽¹⁾

On a rainy night in 2017, I was on my way back to my studio in a friend’s car after I had finished surveying a site where I was planning to film my work A Field of Non-Field.⁽²⁾ We passed an empty field, in which a person was standing motionless, head down, and soaking wet in the pouring rain. The rain and darkness made it impossible to tell if the person was male or female, no less determine why he or she was standing there, but the ambiguous gender and loneliness of this image still drift through my mind from time to time.

Since then, this startling image has inexplicably been impossible to uproot from my memory and seems to have been guiding me toward some not necessarily logical associations. Among these, two stand out. The first was prompted by the unrelenting rain enveloping us and that solitary person standing stock-still in the field. I associate the rain with the endless stream of information in the Internet age generated by the empire’s pervasive control system, and the fact that we have no escape from this constant flood of information that permeates everything including us.

The other association is with these lines from the Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva Fundamental Vow Sutra: “At that time, from the hells of all of the unthinkable, immeasurable, inexpressible asankhyeya (innumerable) numbers of worlds, all of Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva’s manifestations came to assemble in the Trayastrimsas Palace,” and with, “At that time, all the separate emanations of Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva from all the countless worlds merged into one form.”⁽³⁾ These two lines of the Sutra have led me to believe that any one form is actually composed of a multitude of forms, and that one form can therefore be dispersed into an infinite multitude of manifestations. Also, hell is not just one place, but rather, new hells can be created in any world that includes the depths of the human heart. To me, that solitary person of unknown gender standing in the rain has seemed like the Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva temporarily merged together into one form. Furthermore, this temporarily formed Bodhisattva could be on the verge of once again dispersing into innumerable manifestations, or could remain as one form containing a multitude of manifestations. This person, therefore, is the Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva of both one and many manifestations.⁽⁴⁾

Of course, these free and disordered thoughts are just some ideas that have guided my artwork. I think that art is ultimately some idea or visualization that overflows from spoken language or is beyond the written word, and inevitably triggers different thoughts in different observers. When these different unrestrained thoughts take place, different perceptions also arise.

Consequently, my fleeting glimpse of that remarkable moment in the rain-soaked field that lodged in my mind has become two videos projected on the opposite sides of a panel. In the first, one can see both the solitary figure and the field, but in the second, the surroundings are not visible; there are only the motionless individual, abstracted rain streaking past like electric current, and the invisible wind. The stillness and acceleration form a certain state of timeless dialog, interaction, and mixed yet opposing forces.

Notes

1.  In The Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva Fundamental Vow Sutra, previous incarnations of Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva as both men and women are mentioned, but in either case, solemn vows are made, which is to attain Buddhahood (enlightenment) only after all sentient beings (including different species) are liberated from their suffering. In fact, Prabhacaksuh (Bright-Eyes), a woman who made a vow to rescue her mother from hell, was a previous incarnation of the Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva. The well known chant created by those who preached the Sutra, “Until hell is empty, I will not attain Buddhahood; Until all sentient beings are liberated, I will not realize enlightenment” is actually based on Prabhacaksuh’s solemn vow and is the spiritual essence of The Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva Fundamental Vow Sutra. Setting aside the myth for a moment, we might consider all those who exhaust their mental or physical power to help sentient beings as one of the countless manifestations of the Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva.
2. The film A Field of Non-Field is the first chapter of the long-term project Her and Her Children, Worn Away is the prologue, and In a World Losing Multiple Worlds I & II is the introduction to the entire project. Each work can be established independently, or can be linked into a narrative that echoes all of the others in the series.
3. A brief introduction to The Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva Sutra can be found on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kṣitigarbha_Bodhisattva_Pūrvapraṇidhāna_Sūtra [Accessed May 10, 2024]
4. The filming location for A Field of Non-Field was ultimately changed to this field where I encountered the arresting vision. We also found a simple temple that was about 60 cm high and constructed of stacked stones in the field. It enshrined a Buddha statue that was left behind, and while its face was indistinct, judging by its form, it was most likely the Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva. After we finished filming, we transformed the small stone temple, which was out in the rain and seemed ready to collapse at any moment, into a small stainless steel temple that we painted red. The size, proportions, and orientation of the new temple were all decided by consulting the Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva using poe divination blocks.
5. Installation view photographed by Hao YANG.

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