My thoughts on Lawrence Weschler’s Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over 30 Years of Conversation with Robert Irwin.

I remember looking at the mosaic wall of my bathroom in a place I used to live. It was a most simplest wall you can ever imagine. It was brown. It was those walls with flowery patterns overlapping with each other in the most frantic and random manner, tiled against each other like a troop of army wearing slightly different shades of uniform. Theoretically speaking, the wall should have nothing discernible as a figure, or as an object.

Or was it?

I used to sit on the toilet bowl watching the mosaic wall aimlessly while doing my thing (as for what thing, I won’t go into detail here). While I was doing so, a funny thing occured: if I looked at the wall with laser-sharp focus, all I see was undecipherable patterns. However, if I started to see the patterns out of focus, sometimes I would notice something interesting: I can see everything in those patterns. I remembered seeing clouds in there; as well as dogs; dragons; houses; you name it. It was like every time I went to take a dump a new creature would greeted me, obediently, silently, by the corner of that wall, waiting for me to acknowledge its presence and gave it a pat on the back.

It is one of the most memorable and fascinating things I’ve experienced in my life. And it was the kind of lessons Weschler is trying to convey in this book, along with the master Weschler was biographing, Robert Irwin.

Apart from the recurring themes of figure-ground relationship in modern art and the importance of perception before recognition, reading this book has shed some new light on my interpretation of the perennial question of “what does art brings?”. Claiming that it has only one answer is definitely highfalutin and borderline dilettantish; art is different thing to different people. After reading this book, I believe that a very important role of art that I have learned is to open up people’s mind; to other people’s feeling (through a good fiction), to the good aesthetics in the world (through painting and movie and music), and most importantly, to the great joys of life that often lie in a subliminal, perceptual space that precedes any meaning-making and semantics.

You feel happy not because you know something good is happening; you feel happy simply because you simply feel it. Often case, you don’t need a reason for that.

The same article can be found in my not-so-frequently-updated personal blog on art, musics, design, and technology (mostly Apple).