Getting to Know

I like to understand a piece of artwork not just from the initial encounter through looking and experiencing, but also understand the make and journey of the artist in his/her quest of finding the centre, focus and direction for the work.

It is no difference from getting to know a person. The initial attraction has to be there, but after that it is so much about understanding the person, through conversing, listening, and offering the time to hear and feel the history of the person. Where did he/she come from, who is he/she, and where is he/she going? The holistic way of understanding a person enables a deeper connection, one that is often strong and firm across time and space.

Take the art work of Antony Gormley’s sculptures as an example. The development of the artist’s work had so much to do with his inner belief that our body is the first inhabitation and the environment comes the second. From his early period of using his own body as the base shape to transfer his inner energy, tension to the work, to the evolution of the deployed materials ( from lead, iron, to clay, earth, terracotta, resin), to the diverse scale and the revealing efforts of placing sculpture in its relationships to a gallery or an outer space.

The evolution of the artist’s work is extraordinary which shows the commitment of the artist’s pilgrimage to his own quest of finding meaning in his work, but as well as the positioning of his work in the context of the art scene of the time, that is, how he went on research trips, made discovery, and made his own decision where he would like his work to be placed in the context of art history.

When I came to know his work, the draw has been always there. His haunting lone figure in a gallery space or becoming one with the outer natural landscape. But by understanding his journey of being an artist, it gives so much more texture when I look at his work, it is like reading a story, getting to know the characters in the story, experiencing the world through the journey of the characters, while having a wider appreciation where those characters came from or were influenced by the macro environment.

That to me is why understanding art is important. What I observed is that often the more we know, the more we will see and experience. We, often like art works, are part of the creation by our environment and that includes, among many, knowledge, culture, and social context. So that getting to know often transcends from appreciating a piece of art work, an artist, to a deeper understanding of our own living, being in the world.