The Path of an Artist

As I venture through the world of contemporary art and think about what I want to create, my standpoint continuously shifts like lights twinkling on the surface of moving water, though the trajectory overall has been positive.

There remains a strong calling of fine art in the realm of art today, like a sculpture that speaks perfectly the human form, a painting that captures the soul of a face or a place, or a drawing that delineates perfectly what a form shall represent or look like.

There is also the realm of conceptual art where the maker infuses ideologies, culture, history into a piece of work that may look alien and unwelcoming yet no less concentrated with the efforts the artist has put in. To appreciate this, the intensive looking is no longer sufficient; one has to read and understand the context of the subject enough to appreciate the intention of the art work.

There is of course the third kind, and this is the kind that I am drawn to. Take Cornelia Parker’s Cold Dark Matter, An Explored View as an example, in essence it was a garden shed blown into pieces which the artist then used to create this hypnotising, dazzling art piece. For me the work has so many dimensions that it can speak to all viewers.

The artist, from sculpture background, made the unconventional sculpture form that still speaks a lot about the essential facets of a sculpture: light, mass, size, material, contrast, space. It echoes with my own philosophy that sculpture as a medium can go so much beyond its traditional representational quality and extend into other realms such as installation art.

I like arts that are fused with context and ideas, but also allow viewers of all kinds to be able to appreciate them, with or without having to understand the whole art history. Creating art can be a very private matter, but any art that attracts me has often that quiet quality, to be able to stand on its own, without a heavy packaged messaging.

Having said all those above, it does not mean that any aspiring artist can then take the short cut, going straight to the area of interest and ignore all others. I think the path of an artist is the path of a curious child passing through life. The child has the fearless quality of marching, the curious quality of looking, the innocent quality of exploring, and also the almost dogged stubbornness of searching for good things, and once found never letting them go.

The stubbornness comes from a rooted centre of continuously questioning, defining, and differentiating who and what is an artist, and what is it that the artist looks to create and communicate. From that sense I feel the path of an artist is also a path of life, a path that one can only take with an awakening and inquiring mind, as without which the path  of an artist is just any path and the life  just any life.