|
Some days, you and I go mad.
Our bellies get stuffed full,
Hearts break, minds snap.
We can’t go on the old way so
We change. Our lives pivot,
Forming a mysterious geometry.
|
“South China Woman” Wang Yidong 1988 Oil on canvas 24" x 20" Wang Yidong was born in the Yimeng area of Shandong province in 1955, received a degree from the Fine Arts Department of Shandong Art School in 1975 and then had his graduate studies interrupted by the Cultural Revolution. In 1982 however, he graduated from the Oil Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. His work has been exhibited worldwide from France to Japan, New York to Hong Kong, Canada to Italy, and in countless shows throughout China. He was one of six artists invited to America by Robert A. Hefner III for the opening of the Harkness House Exhibition in New York in April of 1987. Following that show, he lived in Oklahoma for one year, but the need to paint the subjects closest to him sent him home to China. He is currently an associate professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. "South China Woman" is a portrait Wang made trying to combine an ancient Chinese style called Fantasy, which is very precise, and the early Renaissance style of painting. He found the model while traveling in Southern China. |
| Stanford
Studies on Daoism Dao and Names: The Laozi or Daode Jing Laozi talks mainly of name (word) pairs — opposites. Naming is analogous to “carving.” (The symbol of the nameless is pu simplicity an uncarved block of wood.) When we learn the way to use a word (e.g. watching teachers “rectify” names) we adopt an institutional practice of “cutting” things and assigning names to them in acting. With the names we acquire a value or desire for one of the discriminants. The desires then shape our wei deeming:action. Much of the reasoning attributed to Laozi here follows that of Song Xing. The artificially created desires lead to unnecessary competition and strife. When we see that they are not natural, acquiring socialized desires (e.g. for status, reputation, for rare objects) starts to look ill advised. He hints at places that acquiring the system of names dulls our capacity for appreciation or reaction to nature (“the five colors blind the eye...”). And most important, acquiring knowledge in this way is losing the natural spontaneity and becoming subject to social control. The text, accordingly, entices us to free ourselves from this system signified by the slogan wu-wei lack-action. We are to set about forgetting all our socialization and return to the state of a newborn babe. The slogan is famously paradoxical and is even formulated in the text in a paradoxical way — “lack acting and yet lack ‘don’t-act’.” The bulk of the Daode Jing is thus given over to motivating this paradoxical attitude. Its essential strategy for doing this centers on the notion of “reversal.” In passage after passage, advice is given that reverses the values usually taken for granted in social (Confucian-Mohist) discourse — either rejecting the usual positive value term or motivating valuing the opposite (non-being, water, the female, the lower position etc.). The result is a fascinating exercise in normative advocacy even including a political theory — which you can find elaborated more fully in the main entry. Clearly, the advocacy is inconsistent with the meta-theory and its purpose must be indirect — perhaps to induce us to “see” one of the three negative positions considered above. Still it gives the text a tone that has come to be known as primitivism — nullifying socialization and cultivating only the “natural” attitudes and actions. |