허희태사진

Boat to the land of enlightenment: neither thought nor non-thought

Everything in the world disappears.

Nothing is captured by the net of time.

Nothing in the world disappears.

Time creates an illusion in all existing beings.

It is a moment to one, and an eternity to others.

While I tried to show sound in screaming brushwork in my emographic work, I intend to display a group of people created by writing and putting numerous pieces together. They disappear and reappear. These images show how a primal phenomenon is an unlearned genetic signal and the energy constantly arousing the cycle of life or the cycle of transmigration is generated from eroticism.

I discover eroticism in my work whether I intended to or not.

A crowd of people standing before the door to the future.

Those rotating in a wheel of time.

A group of people cloned repetitively.

I find sperm competing for an egg in a procession going through a whirlpool.

I discover a red temptation, naturalness that is not governed by any idea, thought, or ethics.

This is the cycle of life and the freedom in instinct.

Fragments that look like a crowd of people are filled with an unknown text. The text is gained through learning. Knowledge and thought secured through learning lends value to life and simultaneously suppresses naturalness. Contemporary people always have conflicts with the two.

Living a life is relatively simple: we have a meal if we are hungry, and we sleep if we feel sleepy.

These simple everyday routines are repressed by mores, knowledge, and ethics in contemporary people’s everyday lives. We always feel thirsty like camels in a desert.

Naturalness and freedom is rooted in desire. To exist and to make things exist ----- this is the most potent desire. Things existent dream of infinity, but are trapped in fatal finiteness. The present is a result of the past, and a path to the uncertain future. One way to escape from this anxious future is reproduction. The most potent energy of making things exist is aroused from eroticism. I present nonsense: neither thought nor non-thought, displaying the sea of desire we cannot escape.

Desire is the driving force of life and also pain. There is the pain of being separated from those whom we love, and birth, old age, sickness, and death in life. Living things aspire to depart from the cycle of transmigration due to the pain of life, escaping from fear of death. They want to escape from pain deriving from desire but pursue life due to pleasure from desire. This is the cause of existence, and existence is the cause of the cycle of transmigration.

Extinguishing such pleasure is a release from samsara, or the cycle of birth and death. Bisang-bibisng (非想非非想) refers to the state that is neither thought nor non-thought. This state is the spiritual world in which we transcend the physical body in the world of form. We at last enter enlightenment, awakening, or a release from samsara after arriving at the hill of enlightenment.

One day Buddha showed us a lotus flower in full bloom.

We wondered what he means. Of us, only Moudgalyana smiled.

Flowers bloom.

A flower is a gate to a dim future from a dim past.

That place is a black hole or a warm hole of all existing things.

The Art of HUH HWE-TAE
painting
video