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Writer's pictureBhang, Youngmoon

<순야타 suññatā 空> - the metaphor of water about the reality the world we live in

Beyond the idea that water forms the basis of life on this Earth, the facts and the images related to water give us a very beautiful metaphor for understanding the meaning of true '空 emptiness'.


Water remains liquid at room temperature. If the temperature of water exceeds 99 degrees Celsius, it will boil violently. So the water evaporates. And at temperatures lower than 0 degrees Celsius, it becomes a solid matter. Fluctuation disappears. We don't call the vapor or steam, water and we don't call the ice, water. But we do know that it comes from the water.


Water is formed from the combination of hydrogen and oxygen molecules. The funny thing is that when an object in air combines violently with oxygen, it burns. The fire is created. Oxidation occurs when combined with oxygen at a slower rate. An important element that makes up water is very different from water when it doesn't make water.


In this way, today we can obtain much richer metaphors and images than in the days of the Buddha, who achieved the realization of '空 emptiness' long, long time ago.


I started to focus on these 'interactions' while concentrating on my work.

It is because of the idea that interaction is the basis of everything we can perceive, and that interaction itself is a fundamental activity of the universe that we are experiencing. This is a different path from materialism, idealism, or Pariṇāmavāda(轉變說, the Transformation theory) or Ārambhavāda(積聚說, being of whole though constructed by parts is different from the sum of parts), which are the traps of conceptualization that we tend to fall into again when we want to overcome the trap of the concept of being/non-being. I just wanted to take the another way for my art works.


When humans do not understand themselves, it becomes difficult to distinguish between desire and vision, fact and imagination.

Ultimately, for humans, ‘reality’ means ‘what one believes that this is the reality’ is ‘reality’. Art is a driving force that expanding the horizon of perception and expands our own understandable world. Human intelligence in the tendency to separate and complex interpretations of things has made various pressures of the air into music, color into art, and language into literature. And we're becoming the first creature to travel outside of Earth through the world that is interpreted in numbers. I want to create works that communicate and communicate rather than being over-immersed in myself and evoke a clear understanding of myself and the world.

My individuality is not a entity but a phenomenon that occurs in the universal world.


The state of balance of the various factors makes the recognizable object. The range of recognizable objects also includes the various components that make up ourselves, also. The phenomenon in which this state of equilibrium gives rise to a recognizable object encompasses everything from the smallest to the largest one.


I composed the work by using <순야타 suññatā 空>

as a generic expression for human cognitive activity.


Therefore, in my work <순야타 suññatā 空>,

the suññatā is an expression that refers to humans and the world they experience.

Humans are 'emptiness', and the world that humans experience is also 'emptiness'.


The suññatā is a Buddhist term, it means the reality of everything we can experience.


Since everything is a phenomenon that depends on each other,

it is impossible to specify the fundamental substance completely.

That's why we say that this is 'emptiness'.

This is a different approach than saying 'nothing'.


Now it is not difficult to get the knowledge of reality that

the reality of ‘existence’ and ‘non-existence’ is actually a process of gathering and dispersing.

‘existence’ and ‘non-existence’ are the linguistic expedients for us, humans created to simply describe them. It's the metaphor of simplification not the description of facts.

And if you look closely this dichotomy, it is also a contradiction, contradictory structure.

Existence presupposes non-existence, and non-existence is perceived through something existence.


I interpret this ‘空’(suññatā) as the viewpoint of mutual causality.


I do not know what lies beyond the phenomenal world,

but things that are meaningful to us are in the world that we can perceive, not only can be perceived through our basic senses, sensory, but also the world we see through the expansion of our senses by advanced technology. Even finding the source of existence in the wave function or quantum vibrations is a world established in our cognition.

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