Dialogue and Boundaries
Duchamp, Mono-ha, Arte Povera, the ZERO Movement, Western Abstraction, Minimalism — A Survey of Six Art-Historical Lines
The Return to the Origin: Readymade Abstraction and the Critique of Perception placed my practice at the intersection of two coordinate lines: one running from Duchamp's “institutional critique” to my own “perceptual critique,” the other running from Western abstraction's “creation” to my “discovery.” This framework is internally coherent, but a scholarly reader is entitled to press further: can Duchamp's practice really be summarized so singularly? Beyond a shared respect for thingness, what exactly is the operational difference between Mono-ha and “readymade abstraction”? Do Arte Povera and the ZERO movement really only “pass alongside” my practice, as I have claimed? Is my relation to the Western abstract tradition really nothing more than “parallel”? And Minimalism, which likewise pursues a “de-subjectified” object — is its practice of gazing at non-human traces to achieve the subject's withdrawal a fellow traveler with mine, or a different path entirely?
This essay answers these questions one by one — not to argue my case, but to survey: to mark, more precisely on the map, the exact distance between the stone on which “the Returner” stands and the neighboring landmarks. Once this surveying is complete, a deeper conclusion will emerge: my relation to each of these six lines is different in kind — some are forks in the road, some are different paths to a similar place, some merely pass alongside me, some run parallel, some are fellow travelers who diverge partway. And it is precisely the precise superposition of these differences that finally traces the independent outline of “readymade abstraction” — an outline that cannot be absorbed into any existing lineage.
Before entering the specific surveying, three methodological notes are needed.
First, the method and internal progression of this essay's measurement.
What follows is not, like Chapter II of The Return to the Origin, a broad staking-out of spiritual coordinates within the general terrain of art history — that work has already been done by the manifesto. Here the task is more precise: measuring, on two levels — conceptual method (spiritual orientation) and medial condition (material foundation) — the exact distance between my practice and each of these six lines. The arrangement of the six dialogues is not arbitrary. They form a progression from “conceptual operation” toward “medial ontology”: the first four groups (Duchamp, Mono-ha, Arte Povera, ZERO) unfold mainly at the level of spiritual orientation — surveying conceptual divergence and convergence, asking “how does our method differ” — though differences of medial condition already surface gradually, as an implicit dimension, within each chapter; the last two groups (Western abstraction, Minimalism) push the argument to the level of medial ontology — asking “in what sense does our medium determine our respective roads.”
Duchamp is the starting point of this line: his readymade operation comes closest to “concept,” farthest from “medium” — a naming, a single act of moving an object, completes the whole operation; the material of the medium constitutes almost no constraint at all. From Mono-ha onward, the materiality of the thing gradually returns: Mono-ha's stones and earth have weight, volume, an irreducible spatial presence; Arte Povera's scrap materials have texture, history, the traces of having been used; the ZERO movement's light and space have a physical presence; Western abstraction's canvas and pigment have an ineliminable handmade quality; Minimalism's industrial objects push the materiality of the medium to its extreme — letting the thing occupy space through pure physical presence. This line's endpoint is my digital photography: the materiality of the medium compressed to its lightest — nothing but the irreversible physical trace light leaves upon a photosensitive sensor.
From Duchamp's concept to my index, the six dialogues form a closed loop running from “the lightest medium” to “the lightest medium”: Duchamp used a single naming to let a urinal become art; I use a single act of gazing to let a wall become a developing image — both attempts to reduce the weight of the medium to its minimum, but Duchamp lowered the threshold of the institution, while I lower the concealment of perception. This loop is not a repetition, but a deepening of the question: once the medium has been reduced to nothing but an index, what remains of art? My answer is — resonant communion. That image exported from a digital camera is light enough to be nothing but the trace light has left behind. But what it carries is the entire span of time a person once stood before a silent wall, pierced through by its silence.
This progressive line finds its final form in Chapter Six: all the differences ultimately converge on medial difference, and medial difference in turn points back to the same origin — that fissure, forever unable to be filled and forever unable to be canceled, between myself and the thing. Chapter Six of this essay will complete this convergence, following the thread of medium, arriving at the conclusion that “medial difference is fundamental.” The positive argument for “why this medium is irreplaceable” — unfolding across five dimensions: indexicality, immediacy, the violence of the transformative rupture, pixel-level responsiveness, and ordinariness — will be completed in this essay's companion piece, Why It Must Be Digital Photography: The Medial Ontology of Readymade Abstraction and Perceptual Critique. This essay's surveying stops at pointing out the root of medial difference; the argument for its necessity will be unfolded directly in that companion study.
Second, the interlocutors of this essay are drawn primarily from Western art history, or art-historical lineages influenced by the West.
There is, within Chinese traditional art, an equally significant undercurrent of “not expression but manifestation” — but it lies outside the scope of this essay. Methodologically, this essay can be read as a negative map of “what I am not” — it tells the reader that I do not lie on the extension of any single line surveyed here: I am not on the extension of Duchamp's conceptual readymade and institutional critique; not on the road of Mono-ha's presence-of-thingness and ontological relation; not within the sequence of Arte Povera's displacement of objects and transformation of space; not in the camp of the ZERO movement's manufactured objectivity and utopian clean slate; nor am I on the extension of the Western abstract tradition — whether the subjective projection of expressive abstraction, or the transcendental order of constructive abstraction. Nor am I on the extension of Minimalism's industrial impersonality and spatial presence. These six lines differ in path and in aim, but they share this in common: the position where I stand does not lie along any of these existing maps' routes.
The positive development of “what I am” — my inner resonance with the Eastern bloodline — will be completed in this essay's companion piece, Appearance Beyond Appearance: The Path of “Manifestation” in Dialogue with the Ancients. Here I offer only a signpost, so the reader knows I do not stand on empty ground. In that essay, I will trace a line beginning with Huineng. His words, “originally there is not one thing,” spoken from the mouth of an illiterate laborer, buried an undercurrent that would run through a thousand years of subsequent Chinese art: art is not for “adding” something, but for “recognizing” that which was already there. “Originally there is not one thing” is not nihilism, but a thoroughgoing logic of subtraction — blowing away, one by one, the conceptual dust that has accumulated on the thing, until what remains, that “nothing at all,” is precisely the field within which the ten thousand things are able to manifest of themselves. Following this thread, Muqi's Six Persimmons, with the silence of six persimmons laid out in a row, lets the thing escape from the literati's moral metaphor, returning to a state of “simply being there”; the fish and birds painted by Bada Shanren, rolling their eyes white, are not only “not expressing” — they are actively refusing to be interpreted, possessed, folded into any system of meaning. Together they constitute a path that refuses to be co-opted, silent, arriving at manifestation through subtraction. And Shitao's principle of “using my own method” takes this subtraction a step further, letting every encounter with a thing become an independent, unrepeatable event of manifestation — not a fixed style, but a posture regenerated anew in each encounter. This line resonates deeply, in spiritual orientation, with my “readymade abstraction”: I stand before a wall, letting the mottling and flaking be released from the naming of “wall” — this is the same act, executed in a different medium, as what Huineng's “originally there is not one thing” points toward. Only when the two essays are read together does the complete map of East-West return come into view.
Third, the ghost of aesthetic habit within “discovered objectivity” — a self-awareness running throughout this essay.
This essay must confess, from the outset, a deep tension running through every dialogue that follows: when, in the Duchamp section, I reflect deeply on the aesthetic preference implicit in “selection” (why am I always drawn to mottled walls?), and yet, in Chapter Five, define “discovery” as an objective disclosure standing opposed to Minimalism's “manufacture,” a gap opens in my argument that has not been fully closed. “Being seized by the wall” and “recognizing, through my own aesthetic habit, something of its own kind” are, at the instant they occur, indistinguishable. This means: “discovered objectivity” is not a pure state that can be arrived at, but a direction requiring continuous calibration. Every “discovery” is, at the same time, a projection of my aesthetic preference — but this does not mean discovery is false; it only means my discovery is conditioned, limited, carrying bias. This essay will return to this tension at the appropriate point in every chapter, especially in Chapter Five's dialogue with Minimalism, where it will be unfolded as the most central entanglement. Acknowledging that this gap exists is more honest than pretending it can be sutured shut. The task of practice lies not in eliminating these conditions, but in continually recognizing them.
I. Duchamp: The Unfinished Road from “Institutional Critique” to “Perceptual Critique”
1.1 A Simplified Duchamp: The Self-Awareness of the “Non-Retinal”
Summarizing Duchamp's readymade practice as “institutional critique” — questioning what art is by sending a urinal into an exhibition hall — has become nearly a matter of common sense in art-history textbooks. But this narrative omits a key dimension of his practice.
Throughout his life, Duchamp pursued what he called “non-retinal art.” He rejected the work of many of his contemporaries, calling it “retinal art” — art meant “only to please the eye.”[1] What he wanted was for art to serve thought once again. He stated explicitly that the entire century since 1880 had operated within the “retinal category” — reduced, as he put it, to sensuous feeling alone[2] — and what he tried to break was exactly this reduction of art to a bath of the senses. In 3 Standard Stoppages, he let three lengths of thread fall from a height of one meter, fixing their form into random curves, a gesture that expressed, in his own account, his revulsion toward “retinal” painting.[3] What he pursued was liberating painting from mere visual pleasure, letting it carry thought instead.
But “non-retinal” is not simply “replacing vision with concept.” Duchamp's late work, Étant donnés (1946–1966), is an installation of tremendous visual impact — the viewer must look through a peephole in a door, and the visual experience itself constitutes the core of the work. What Duchamp rejected was not vision itself, but a particular kind of visual pleasure — the “retinal” kind, tamed by taste, elegance, formal beauty. What he pursued may have been closer to an anti-aesthetic vision — a direct, bodily kind of seeing, untamed by taste.
This means: Duchamp's readymade practice goes far beyond the strategy of contextual transformation — “moving an everyday object into the museum.” It also contains a wariness of “pure vision” — a rejection of seeing that remains at the level of the retina alone, never touching thought. In this sense, Duchamp's practice already contains a certain dimension of “perceptual critique”: what he questioned was not only the institutional rule of “what may be called art,” but also the perceptual habit of “at what level should seeing remain.”
1.2 Two Forks of the “Non-Retinal”: Concept Entering vs. Seeing Emptied
When Duchamp said art should serve thought once again, what I recognize in this is a deep distrust of visual pleasure. He saw the limits of “retinal art” — seeing that remains only on the surface of the eye, touching nothing. His solution was: let concept in. Sending a urinal into an exhibition hall was not meant to let people admire its curves, but to make them think about what art is. Duchamp's readymade is a conceptual threshold — cross it, and you enter the territory of thought.
Duchamp's readymade practice traces a complex evolutionary path. From the 1913 Bicycle Wheel — an everyday object he spun each time he passed it, accompanying his thought like a fire in the hearth[4] — to the 1917 Fountain's sharp provocation of the art institution, to the late Étant donnés, an installation that could only be seen through a peephole — Duchamp swayed, throughout, between “concept” and “vision.” He once conceived of a “reciprocal readymade” — taking a Rembrandt painting and using it, not for contemplation, but simply as an ironing board[5] — an extreme proposal that pushes “non-retinal” to the point of abolishing vision itself. But the existence of Étant donnés proves that, in the end, he could not entirely give up the dimension of vision. Duchamp's “non-retinal” is not a straight line, but a winding path full of self-contradiction.
I understand this distrust, because I face the same predicament: contemporary visual culture has already compressed seeing into an act of consumption; the eye has been trained into a high-speed processor that completes recognition, judgment, and moving-on within three seconds. “Retinal art” is not too scarce today — it is far too abundant.
But my solution differs from Duchamp's. His answer was “let concept in”; mine is “let seeing empty out.” Duchamp uses the readymade to perform a conceptual subtraction — reducing the existing definition of “art,” letting “art” as a concept be re-questioned within that emptiness. I use the wall to perform a perceptual subtraction — reducing the wall's everyday function, name, and classification, letting seeing itself happen anew within that emptiness. Duchamp's subtraction is conceptual — subtracting the existing answer to “what is a work of art,” leaving an open question. My subtraction is perceptual — subtracting the existing cognition of “this is a wall,” leaving a pure visual phenomenon.
A deeper difference lies here: Duchamp's critique of “retinal art” was, more than anything, a revulsion toward “taste” and “aesthetic pleasure,” not a questioning of seeing itself. What he rejected was seeing tamed by aesthetics, disciplined by taste; what I question is how seeing itself is concealed by everyday cognition, functional naming, conceptual classification. Our “discontent” looks similar at the phenomenal level — “art should not merely please the eye” — but our philosophical foundations may be far apart: Duchamp's discontent is aesthetic (a revulsion toward taste); mine is perceptual (a revulsion toward cognitive concealment). This distinction makes our fork in the road deeper than a simple opposition of “concept vs. vision.”
This distinction shows itself, in concrete operation, this way: when Duchamp named a urinal Fountain and sent it into an exhibition hall, the urinal's material properties — its shape, its texture, its sheen — did not matter. What mattered was that it had been placed somewhere it did not belong. The viewer's first reaction, on seeing it, is not “is this beautiful,” but “how did this get here” — the conceptual rupture precedes visual perception. Duchamp's practice bypasses the eye and goes straight for the brain.
And when I stand before a wall, letting its mottling manifest through the camera's framing and digital purification, I do exactly the opposite: I am not trying to make viewers think “what is this” — I am trying to let them stop thinking “what is this.” If a viewer, before an image from Seeing Without Seeing, asks “is this a wall,” they have not yet entered the state; if they begin to look at the mottled texture without rushing to name it, seeing has truly begun. My practice bypasses concept and returns to the eye — not the eye of retinal pleasure, but a more original seeing, prior to naming, prior to judgment.
1.3 An Unfinished Thought on “Selection”: The Ghost of Aesthetic Habit
In marking the boundary of my operation, I have proposed “resonant communion as the measure” as a condition. But Duchamp's practice raises a thornier question: the very act of Duchamp choosing a urinal already constitutes the substance of the work — his “choice” is deliberate, provocative. This forces me to face a question I have not yet fully clarified: does my own “choice” — choosing, among countless walls, to gaze at this particular one — carry a similar constitutive force?
I have insisted, again and again, that my choice is passive (“the wall manifests itself to me in my gazing,” “I am seized”) rather than active (“I decide to choose this wall”). But might an artist who has undergone long visual training, in the instant of “being seized,” already be performing a pre-conscious evaluation of form, texture, tone? Where, exactly, is the boundary between this “being seized” and Duchamp's “this will do”?
I must say, honestly: this boundary cannot be drawn cleanly. My “being seized” cannot occur in a vacuum. When I recognize that a wall's mottling is “worth gazing at,” that act of recognition already carries the aesthetic habit I have been steeped in since childhood — from the worn erosion of calligraphy rubbings, to the natural aging of silk in old paintings, to the moss-covered rockery of classical gardens. “I was seized by the wall” and “my aesthetic habit recognized something of its own kind” happen simultaneously, before I am even aware of it. I cannot truly face a wall as a blank slate — my eye has never been an empty receiver.
This means: “discovered objectivity” is not an endpoint that can be reached, but a direction requiring continuous calibration. Every “discovery” is, at the same time, a projection of my aesthetic preference — but this does not mean the discovery is false; it only means my discovery is conditioned, limited, carrying bias. The honesty of practice lies not in eliminating these conditions, but in continually recognizing them. After every instance of “I was seized,” I must ask myself: what seized me? Was it that crack calling out to me, or has my eye already been trained to recognize only one particular kind of glow?
So, between Duchamp's “readymade” and my own “readymade abstraction,” I draw no clean dividing line — only an orientation. My direction is to let the trace of the thing speak, rather than turning the act of selection itself into a gesture. Along this direction, whatever residue of aesthetic habit may remain in the act of selection is not something to be denied, but a condition requiring continuous awareness. This continuous awareness is, itself, the practice of perceptual critique at the moment of selection.
1.4 “That-Has-Been”: An Ontology of Photography Duchamp Never Touched
Beyond Duchamp's discourse of “non-retinal art,” there is a dimension he never truly addressed — and it happens to be photography's most irreplaceable ontological core: what Roland Barthes called that-has-been (ça-a-été).
Barthes points out, in Camera Lucida, that the fundamental difference between photography and painting lies here: what a photograph bears witness to is not only “something being there,” but “it having once been there.”[6] Painting can depict a thing that never existed; photography cannot — its indexicality locks in a real encounter, in real time and space. No matter how much subsequent purification or stripping-away of everyday cognition occurs, the image always still points to a real thing that once appeared before the lens. This “that-has-been” constitutes an ineliminable indexical bond between myself and the wall: I am not painting an imagined wall — I once stood before a real wall, letting its light leave a physical trace on the photosensitive sensor.
This dimension is one Duchamp never touched. Duchamp's readymade relies on the transformation of context — moving an object into the museum, letting its meaning change through the change of place. My “readymade abstraction” relies on the fixation of a trace — letting a real, bodily-present encounter be transformed into a transmissible image. Duchamp changed the position of the object; I change the mode of seeing — and seeing can be changed precisely because the image always carries the mark of that-has-been. If a viewer stands before my image of a wall, they face not only a woven texture of mottling and flaking, but a thing that once truly existed, somewhere in the world. That thing may already have been demolished, painted over, covered — but the image proves it was once there. This guarantee of “having once been there” is something painting cannot offer, and something no installation can replicate.
So “that-has-been” is not an additional condition, external to my practice — it is the most fundamental ontological difference between “readymade abstraction” and “created abstraction.” Everything on Kandinsky's canvas was created; everything in my image, first of all, once existed. This difference cannot be perceived visually, but it constitutes the ethical premise of the work: before pressing the shutter, I once stood before that wall, once stood in its silence for forty minutes. Those forty minutes were not a “process of making” — they were a “process of encounter.” Indexicality freezes that encounter into a transmissible trace, while Duchamp's readymade never promised any “encounter” at all — his urinal was only “selected,” never “gazed at.”
II. Mono-ha: Intersection and Divergent Paths — Surveying Two Philosophies of Thingness
2.1 Mono-ha's Philosophy of Thingness: An Ontological Concern
Mono-ha (物派) was an art movement centered in Japan between 1968 and 1975, whose core members included Nobuo Sekine, Lee Ufan, and Susumu Koshimizu. Its core idea: using unprocessed natural materials — wood, stone, earth — while avoiding, as far as possible, any trace of human handiwork, revealing the world's mode of being through the “relations” between objects.
Lee Ufan, Mono-ha's principal theorist, proposed the core concept of “seeking an encounter.” He held that the aim of art should be to encounter the world. This encounter is dynamic, in flux, emphasizing a resonant connection between work, viewer, and space. He advocated breaking free from the Western rationalist mode of thought, honoring an undivided subject-object thinking that valued nature's “original state.”
In dialogue with Lee Ufan, what I recognize in his “encounter” is an intuition remarkably close to my own “resonant communion” — and yet, in the end, diverging from it. When Lee Ufan says the thing does not exist as an object, but exists in its contact with the world,[7] what I see is a repositioning of the thing's existence — the thing is not an object scrutinized from outside a subject, but manifests itself within a network of relations. I understand this direction, but I walk a different road.
Lee Ufan is concerned with how the thing exists in the world — this is an ontological question. I am concerned with how the thing is seen — this is a question of perception theory. Lee Ufan reveals the world's mode of being through the relation between thing and thing, thing and space; I try, through a transformation in the mode of seeing, to let the thing emerge of itself from beneath the covering of concept.
Let me illustrate this difference through concrete operations. Nobuo Sekine dug out a mass of earth and placed it beside the pit, letting the viewer walk around it — what the viewer sees is the earth's volume, weight, shadow, and the dialogue between it and the empty pit. This is a relational manifestation: the thing's meaning arises from the tension between thing and thing. When I stand before a wall, letting its mottling manifest through the camera's framing and digital purification, I depend not on the relation between thing and thing, but on the focusing of seeing — letting the wall precipitate out from a background of “not worth looking at,” becoming a face that can be gazed at. The thing need not be juxtaposed with any other thing; it need only be stripped from everyday cognition.
Lee Ufan's “encounter” is my relation to the world — a resonance between a subject and a network of relations. My “resonant communion” is closer to my being-with the thing — a state in which the subject-object division has temporarily dissolved: not “I have established a relation,” but “seeing happened, the wall manifested, and 'I' and 'the wall' are only positions temporarily marked out within that event.”
2.2 Philosophical Sources: Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Nishida Kitōrō
Lee Ufan sets out from phenomenology, finding the thing within relation. I set out from Chan, seeing the thing within dissolution. Lee Ufan's Heideggerian coloring keeps his Mono-ha practice within a structure of “Dasein-in-the-world” — the thing manifests within relation, the world is the thing's dwelling place. My Chan coloring inclines my practice toward a more thoroughgoing, structural loosening — not placing the thing within a better relation, but letting the cognitive barrier between “I” and “the thing” become, for a time, transparent. When Zhuangzi says “I have lost myself,” what he does is not improve my relation to the world, but let that fixed “I” itself, for a time, step off the stage. What I seek, standing before a wall, is precisely this stepping-off.
But reducing Lee Ufan's philosophical foundation to Heidegger alone is an incomplete judgment. Scholarship shows that Lee Ufan was deeply versed in modern Western philosophy, with particular study of Martin Heidegger's and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, while also fusing Western thought with the metaphysics of the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitōrō.[8] Merleau-Ponty's “body-subject” and the “primacy of perception” bear a more direct theoretical relation to Mono-ha's core claim of “seeking an encounter” — the encounter occurs at the perceptual level between body and world, not purely at the level of Dasein's structure. And Nishida's “absolute nothingness” provided Mono-ha with an Eastern metaphysical foundation.
So a more accurate account would be: Mono-ha's philosophical foundation is a hybrid of phenomenology (Heidegger plus Merleau-Ponty) and Eastern metaphysics (Nishida Kitōrō), not a single Heideggerian source. Recognizing this lets my “divergent path” relation to Mono-ha appear more precisely, more three-dimensionally — I am not in dialogue with a “purely Heideggerian” Mono-ha, but with a Mono-ha that likewise stands at the confluence of Eastern and Western thought. The difference is not “who is more Eastern,” but that we each set out, from that same confluence, in different directions: Mono-ha moved toward the construction of ontological relation; I moved toward the dissolution of perception theory.
2.3 Presence and Absence vs. Past and Present: A Difference of Temporality
Sekine's Phase—Mother Earth is the starting point of the entire Mono-ha movement. He dug a deep pit in a park, shaping the excavated earth into a cylinder matching the size of the circular pit, setting the two in contrast. The core tension of this work lies in the juxtaposition of “presence and absence” — the cylinder (presence) and the empty pit (absence) appear simultaneously in space, the viewer's gaze moving back and forth between the two, the thing's meaning revealed through this spatial contrast.
Placing Phase—Mother Earth alongside the wall-gazing of Seeing Without Seeing, the difference between the two is not only “physical presence vs. visual manifestation,” but a more fundamental dimension still: Sekine works in space. Through digging, shaping, and juxtaposing earth from the ground, he creates a spatial event: the cylinder is here, the empty pit is there, and the tension between the two depends on their positional relation in physical space. This is a spatial manifestation.
I work in time. The wall was never moved; its mottling and flaking are traces time has deposited at a single location. Every layer of flaking marks a past moment — the earliest layer of lime, the cement applied later, the paint of some particular repainting. They are not a relation of “here and there,” but an overlapping of “past and present” on the same surface. My gaze is a simultaneous viewing of this temporal sedimentation — letting traces from different eras appear together, at once, within a single image.
This is an unspoken yet extremely fundamental difference between Mono-ha and myself: Mono-ha produces a perceptual rupture by changing positional relations in space; I produce a perceptual dissociation by capturing time's sedimentation at a single position. One points toward a spatial “presence and absence”; the other, toward a temporal “past and present.” This temporality is the most fundamental medial difference between Mono-ha and myself.
2.4 Sekine's Self-Account: A Key Parallel
Sekine himself once explicitly distinguished his “thing” from Duchamp's “readymade”: Duchamp's objects are manufactured goods, each with a certain functionality — my works are entirely “thing” itself, with no functionality at all.[9] This distinction forms an interesting parallel with my own claim that “my wall has never been moved” — both Mono-ha and I refuse Duchamp's strategy of contextual transformation, but Mono-ha moves toward “the presence of the thing itself,” while I move toward “the transformation of seeing.”
Mono-ha refuses to treat the thing as a “sign” or “vehicle of function,” instead letting the thing be present as “the thing itself” — this is a material manifestation. I refuse to treat the wall as an “everyday function” or “aesthetic object,” instead letting the wall manifest as “a seen trace” — this is a perceptual manifestation. Mono-ha's “thing itself” is a material presence (a stone is a stone, earth is earth); my “thing itself” is a perceptual manifestation (the wall is no longer a wall, but a visual weave of mottling and flaking). Both share a common enemy — signification and functionalization — but each fights on a different battlefield: Mono-ha fights at the material level; I fight at the perceptual level.
III. Arte Povera: The Presence of the Thing and the Transformation of Seeing
3.1 The Core Idea of Arte Povera
Arte Povera arose in Italy in the late 1960s. Its core idea: using scrap and everyday materials — pulp, scrap iron, rags, wood, earth, plastic — to reduce signs to their most minimal form, restoring them to their archetype. Arte Povera opposed defining traditional standards for art, continually seeking new methods of art-making.
Arte Povera's core posture is: letting the thing be present as the thing. Not using the thing to express something, not using the thing to symbolize something, but letting the thing itself — its materiality, its weight, its texture, its history — appear directly before the viewer.
3.2 Pistoletto's Mirror Paintings: Reflected Seeing
Michelangelo Pistoletto pioneered the technique of “mirror paintings,” made on polished stainless steel, between 1961 and 1962. Through their reflective quality, his mirror paintings draw the viewer and the surrounding space directly into the work itself. In a mirror painting, what the viewer sees is not only the image on the canvas, but also themselves — and the real-time reflection of the entire space behind them.
Pistoletto's work stops me, because he did something similar to what I do, and yet entirely different. When Pistoletto reflects the viewer's image into the painting, he makes the act of seeing itself part of the work. Standing before a mirror painting, you see yourself in the posture of looking — you are looking, and you see yourself looking. Seeing is reflected, folded, made conscious of itself. This is a kind of embryonic “perceptual critique” — it makes it impossible to ignore the act of “seeing” itself, rather than focusing solely on the object “being seen.”
But I move in the opposite direction from him. Pistoletto makes the viewer conscious that they are looking — the mirror reflects the viewer's image back in real time, turning seeing into an act of being seen. My practice tries to let the viewer forget that they are looking — letting the very thought “I am looking” step off the stage, letting seeing become a state unaware of itself.
And yet, interpreting Pistoletto's mirror paintings merely as “making seeing conscious of itself” is incomplete. The more essential breakthrough of the mirror paintings lies in bringing time and the viewer's body into the work simultaneously: the viewer's image is not static, but changes in real time as the viewer moves. The reflection and the real image occur simultaneously — there is no time between a body and its reflection in a mirror.[10] This means what Pistoletto achieved is not merely “the reflection of seeing,” but “the bodily reflection of seeing within time” — which is, in fact, closer to what I call “bodily co-presence” than to what I have called “the forgetting of seeing.”
I must admit: Pistoletto's mirror paintings and my wall-gazing are, on the point of “transforming the viewer from passive bystander into active participant,” closer to each other than I have previously acknowledged. His mirror surface makes it impossible for the viewer to avoid their own position within the act of seeing; my wall makes it impossible for the viewer to avoid their own perceptual state prior to naming. We are both trying to change the structure of seeing — he makes seeing “thicker” (adding a layer of self-consciousness); I try to make seeing “thinner” (thin enough that the distinction between “the one who sees” and “the thing seen” dissolves). The difference lies in direction, but we share the same underlying problem. This lets my relation of “passing alongside” Arte Povera reveal a richer layering: not simply opposite directions, but two different responses to the same question.
3.3 Kounellis's Live Horses: The Presence of Displacement and the Fixed-Point Gaze
In 1969, Jannis Kounellis staged an installation of twelve live horses, shaking the art world. He brought living animals into the gallery space, letting them graze, walk, and defecate within the exhibition hall. This is, undeniably, a form of “letting the thing show itself” — the horses were not transformed into any sign, not processed into any form; they simply were themselves.
When Kounellis brought horses into the gallery, he let living life burst into art's white cube. The horses' breath, body heat, dung, uncontrollable movement — this “non-art” materiality produced tremendous tension between the gallery's white walls. The viewer no longer faced a “work,” but a living, uncooperative, potentially unpredictable presence at any moment. Kounellis's horses did not need to be “understood” — they needed only to “be present.” Their existence alone was a questioning of the art institution.
But there is a fundamental fork between his path and mine: the manner in which the thing is present. Kounellis's horses were “brought into” the gallery — moved from an everyday space (the stable, the field) into an art space (the gallery), and this very act of moving already completes the operation of “contextual transformation.” The horses did not need to be “seen” — they only needed to “be present” — their materiality, their vitality, their uncontrollability were already enough to constitute meaning. This is a strategy of displacement: producing a rupture of meaning by moving the thing out of its original context and into an entirely different one.
My walls, however, have never been moved. They remain always in place — in the city's streets and alleys, on the side walls of abandoned factories, in corners no one passes through. My work is not to “bring” them into any space, but to let them, in the very place they have been ignored, regain the right to be gazed at. Kounellis's strategy is the displacement of the thing — bringing the thing before the viewer. My strategy is the redirection of seeing — bringing the viewer's gaze before the thing.
One produces a perceptual rupture by changing the thing's position in space; the other produces a perceptual dissociation by changing the direction of seeing. Both try to “let the thing be seen,” but the displacement of the thing turns it into a spectacle — a horse appearing in a gallery is, in itself, a shocking event; my walls are, in no sense, a spectacle — they have always been there, simply never seen. My work is not to produce shock, but to let that silence — “always here, yet never seen” — be touched by a quiet, extended gaze.
A deeper difference lies here: Kounellis's horses are alive, breathing, capable of moving — their non-cooperation is, in itself, meaning. My wall is silent, unchanging, responding to no summons. A living horse does not need you to “see” it — its presence alone is enough. The wall needs to be seen — it will not walk toward you on its own; it will only remain in place, waiting for someone willing to stop. Kounellis's horse is a bolt of lightning; my wall is a stone. Lightning startles; a stone lets you linger. And I choose to be the one who lingers.
And yet, having emphasized these differences, there is a more hidden commonality worth acknowledging: when that horse grazed, walked, and defecated in the gallery, it, too, was refusing to be “read” — it was not a sign, not a metaphor, not a tool the artist used to “express” something. In that sense, Kounellis's horse and my wall share the same resistance to “being transformed into meaning.” The difference lies only in the manner of resistance: the horse resists through its vitality and uncontrollability; the wall resists through its silence and its refusal to respond. Acknowledging this deeper resonance does not blur the boundary between myself and Arte Povera — it only makes that boundary more three-dimensional: not “entirely different,” but “sharing a certain baseline of respect for the thing, while moving in different directions.”
IV. The ZERO Movement: Manufactured Objectivity and Discovered Objectivity
4.1 The ZERO Movement's Pursuit of Objectification
The ZERO movement tried to rescue art from the personal emotion of Abstract Expressionism, pursuing an objectified art. Its artists used monochrome, light, movement, and space to produce a physical presence within canvas and space.
The ZERO movement was founded by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1957; Günther Uecker joined in 1961; activity continued until 1966. One of its core aims was creating a zone of silence and pure possibility, for a new beginning.[11] This “zero” carried multiple meanings: it was, at once, a symbol of postwar reconstruction — starting again from zero — a pursuit of de-personalized objectivity, and a reverence for the transformative power of light and space.
The internal logic of the ZERO movement runs as follows: if Abstract Expressionism's subjectivity had already swelled to its limit — Pollock's canvas covered entirely in traces of the body, Rothko's Color Fields entirely in tremors of the soul — then the next step is to let the subject step off the stage. Let light speak for itself, let monochrome exist for itself, let space itself become the work. The “objectivity” the ZERO movement pursued was, at its core, an attempt to liberate art from the internal noise of the artist, letting matter exist in a “non-expressive” way. This was a response to the overload of subjectivity.
Worth noting: the ZERO movement was not only a European phenomenon — it developed into a transnational network, from major European artists (Klein, Fontana, Tinguely) to Japan's Gutai group, both of whom participated in related activities. Gutai's behavioral exploration of material — tearing, burning, puncturing, trampling — and the ZERO movement's immaterial pursuit of light and space constituted, in the 1960s, two poles of “objectification” experiment: one let the thing's materiality be present in the most violent way possible; the other let materiality withdraw into pure light and space. Together they shaped a global context of post-experimental art. This is not to say my own practice has a direct lineage with the ZERO movement or Gutai — it is to say: when I picked up a camera in the hills of central Fujian's Yongtai, after the 1990s, what I faced was no longer a “pure Eastern tradition untouched by the West,” but an intellectual terrain where every kind of “objectification” experiment had already occurred. The ZERO movement's “zero” (as an actively cleared utopia) and Gutai's “concrete” (as the extreme material presence of the material itself) — the tension between these two poles constitutes a frame of reference I could not avoid when later choosing “subtraction.” And my subtraction is neither the ZERO movement's productive clearing nor Gutai's material presence, but a third path, arising within the fissure between these two poles — letting the thing manifest of itself through a gaze directed at forgotten traces. But this essay's argument will return to the fundamental difference between the ZERO movement and myself — manufactured objectivity versus discovered objectivity — the reference to Gutai here serves only as a signpost; its fuller development is left for elsewhere.
4.2 Manufactured Objectivity and Discovered Objectivity
The ZERO movement's pursuit of “objectification” forces me to face a fundamental divergence: we are both trying to reach a state of “zero degree,” but the meaning of “zero” is entirely different.
When ZERO artists created effects of light on canvas, arranged moving installations in space, their goal was to produce an “objective” visual experience — a directly present visual event, needing no explanation. This objectification's starting point remains production: the artist manufactures a situation, and lets the viewer experience it. The light is not natural light — it is light arranged by the artist; the space is not just any space — it is a space chosen by the artist. The ZERO movement's “zero” is an active clearing — the artist actively empties their own desire for expression, then produces a form of “non-expression.”
My “zero” is different. It is a passive discovery, not an active production. The mottling, flaking, and seepage on a wall — these are not things I have manufactured. They are traces time, rain, and human activity have left on a material surface. The “zero” I reach is not achieved by subtracting something from a canvas, but by subtracting cognitive concealment from a trace that already exists.
The ZERO movement moves from something to zero — the artist starts from a subject full of expression, and reduces expression to zero. I move from zero to zero — that wall was already “zero” (meaningless, functionless, ignored); I only let this “zero” be seen.
The ZERO movement's “zero” is more complex than what I have described. It is not only “manufactured objectivity,” but also a “spiritual clearing upon postwar ruins” — a response to historical rupture, a belief in the possibility of rebuilding. Piene's “zone of silence and pure possibility” itself carries a lifting-off of historical burden. In this dimension, the ZERO movement's “zero” and my own “zero” share the same longing for “beginning again.”
The difference lies here: the ZERO movement's new beginning faces forward — building a new world upon ruins; my new beginning faces backward — returning to the origin point concept has not yet covered. One is a futurist clearing; the other, an archaeological return.
The ZERO movement's pursuit of objectification is, at its core, still a modernist utopia — believing the artist can reach a kind of purity through self-discipline. Their “zero” is an ideal state, a visual pure land that must be constructed. My wall carries none of this utopian coloring. The wall's mottling is not some “pure vision” — it is time's sedimentation, the writing of wind and rain, scratches left jointly by the human and the natural. “Mottling” is not an aesthetic ideal — it is a fact. The “zero” I reach is not an idealized thing like “pure vision,” but the silent fact that remains once the wall has been stripped from everyday cognition.
So the ZERO movement's objectification is a manufactured objectivity — it is still manufacturing a “work.” My objectification is a discovered objectivity — it only lets something “already there” be seen. The ZERO movement creates an “objective” visual field, for the viewer to enter; my practice lets a “neglected” visual field precipitate out from the background, entering the viewer's field of vision. The former is spatial construction; the latter, a redistribution of attention.
If the most fundamental difference must be put in a single sentence: the ZERO movement asks, “what objective thing can I manufacture?” I ask, “can I stop concealing what is already objectively there?”
V. Created Abstraction and Discovered Abstraction: A Parallel Visual Ontology
Beyond the four lines above, there is an enormous vein of thought that cannot be sidestepped — the Western abstract tradition. My final images inevitably neighbor abstract painting in visual form, but stopping at formal analogy would conceal the most fundamental division. The word “abstraction” in “readymade abstraction” must acquire its own independent meaning within this dialogue.
5.1 Three Subjective Abstractions, and My Own Direction
The hundred years of Western modernism was a hundred years in which abstract art pushed “subjectivity” to its extreme. I must first face these three subjective abstractions, because they are, in visual form, the closest neighbors to my work — a viewer might easily mistake my wall images for some kind of abstract photography or abstract painting. But it is precisely this visual proximity that makes revealing the fundamental difference more urgent.
Kandinsky's abstraction is a created abstraction. He externalized inner spiritual necessity into form and color; the canvas is the developing fluid of the soul, abstraction the highest expression of subjectivity. What he painted was the equivalent of an inner rhythm. Everything on the canvas originates in the projection of the artist's inner spirit. In Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky famously compared color to the keys of a piano, the eye to the hammer, and the soul to the piano itself[12] — in this metaphor, the thing (color) is only a medium; the soul is the source. Abstraction is the soul made visible.
Facing Kandinsky, I see a starting point entirely opposite to my own. When he says inner need is externalized into form, his canvas is blank, waiting to be filled by the soul; my image already exists, waiting to be stripped of cognition. Kandinsky moves from emptiness to fullness; I move from fullness to emptiness. Every stroke he makes is an addition; every operation I perform is a subtraction. We both work within the domain called “abstraction,” but Kandinsky's abstraction is the projection of an inner landscape; mine is the manifestation of an external trace. One looks from inside out; the other, from outside in — the direction of looking is reversed, and so the “abstraction” each arrives at is naturally a different thing. My “discovered abstraction” is not a continuation or rebellion against Kandinsky, but a thoroughgoing turn — from “how the soul externalizes itself” to “how concealment flakes away.” But with another current within Western abstraction — the constructive withdrawal of Malevich and Mondrian — what I share is only the problem-consciousness of “de-subjectification”; the way we arrive at it is entirely different (see Section 5.3).
Pollock's abstraction is an abstraction of action. The body moves above the canvas; pigment leaves the trace of action in the pull of gravity and the sweep of the arm. The canvas is not the vehicle of an image, but the site where an event occurs. Abstraction is the direct record of bodily movement. Pollock said that while he was in his painting, he was not aware of what he was doing[13] — but he was still “doing”; everything on the canvas remains an extension of his bodily will, a form of subjectivity output directly through the body, bypassing the mind.
Facing Pollock, what I read is a state of “unconsciousness” different from my own. When he says he was not aware of what he was doing while in his painting, that is the freedom of unconscious action — the body precedes consciousness, the canvas records the body's movement. When I stand before a wall, it is exactly the opposite: I need to stop acting, stop the body's impulse, stop the desire to “do” — I only wait, letting the thing manifest toward me. Pollock's “not knowing what he was doing” is a kind of trance; my “not knowing what I am waiting for” is a kind of emptying-out. Both escape conscious control, but in opposite directions: Pollock lets the body take over; I let the body step off the stage. Pollock left the trace of action on the canvas; I search the wall for a trace of “non-action” — time, rain, weathering — traces belonging to no one's action; they simply happened. Pollock's work is evidence of the body's presence; my image is a trace of time's presence.
Rothko's abstraction is a sublime abstraction. Vast Color Fields hover on the canvas, trying to evoke a transcendent, quasi-religious spiritual experience. It is a silent meditation on the infinite, an artist's effort to touch the unspeakable. Rothko said his only interest was expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom[14] — the Color Field on the canvas is the vessel through which he tried to give these emotions visible form.
Facing Rothko, what I see is an active summoning of the sublime. When he tries to express “basic human emotions,” the Color Fields on the canvas are an entry point toward a transcendent experience, a bridge the artist builds for the viewer, toward the unspeakable. When I face a wall, I carry no such intention of “trying” — I simply stand before that wall, waiting for its silence to open on its own. Rothko's abstraction summons the sublime; mine waits for manifestation — the former arrives through thickness and depth, the latter through thinning and emptying. Rothko needs vast Color Fields to hold the weight of tragedy, ecstasy, doom; I need only a forgotten wall — its mottling carries no “basic emotion”; it carries only time and weather. Rothko's canvas is a vessel for emotion; my wall is an archive of time. Rothko invites you into his spiritual world; I invite you to leave your own spiritual world, and face the wall's existence.
Now let me state the most fundamental difference between these three giants and myself: “I create an abstraction on the canvas” and “I discover an abstraction on the wall” are two entirely different kinds of existential event. The former is production; the latter, disclosure. The former is the overflow of subjectivity; the latter, its withdrawal. The former arrives at richness through addition; the latter, at manifestation through subtraction.
Time, rain, weathering, painting and flaking — these non-human processes have jointly deposited a mottled brushwork on the wall. There is no place for “the artist” here. If there is any “creation” to speak of, it is that I decided to stop, decided to look, decided not to look away. That decision is my only subjective act. And once that decision is complete, I let that subjectivity step off the stage, and let the wall speak for itself.
5.2 Parallel Roads, Not Opposing Camps
The mainstream narrative of Western abstraction — from Kandinsky to Pollock to Rothko — is the century-long effort of externalizing a person's inner spirit into perceivable form. What I do is precisely the opposite — letting that “inner” be temporarily suspended, letting the thing's own nature emerge from beneath the covering of concept. But it must be pointed out that there is also, within Western abstraction, a current sharing my own problem-consciousness of “de-subjectification” (Malevich's zero-degree of the thing, Mondrian's universal pure expression) — my fundamental difference from them lies not in “whether to de-subjectify,” but in “how to de-subjectify” — theirs is a constructive, transcendental withdrawal; mine is a discovered, empirical withdrawal (see Section 5.3).
This is not a negation of Western abstraction, still less an “Eastern wisdom rescuing a Western crisis” — I reject that essentialist narrative. I would rather say: these are two parallel roads. One expresses outward, the other returns inward; one arrives at richness through addition, the other at manifestation through subtraction. They may meet on the same museum wall, yet speak different languages.
Kandinsky, Pollock, Rothko — they walked a brave road, laying the human interior's abyss out flat upon the canvas. I walk a different road: turning my eye away from the interior's noise, toward those neglected, silent things outside that have never been properly regarded. Both roads arrive at the form called “abstraction,” but the scenery along the way is entirely different. Along one road, a painter pours out their soul before the canvas; along the other, a person sets down every expectation before a wall, waiting for the trace time has left to speak on its own. Both roads are worth walking — only, whoever walks one road need not pretend they are also walking the other.
My work offers “abstraction” a humble possibility, arising from the domain of perception, achieved through subtraction — not a supplement to Western abstraction, but an independent point of departure, starting over. I am not opening a new position along the extension of Western abstraction — I have grown another kind of abstraction, from Eastern roots. These are not a relation of progress and replacement, but two roads, each complete in itself — one leading to the extreme of subjectivity, the other to its dissolution.
5.3 A Concealed Line: “The Subject's Withdrawal” Within Western Abstraction
Reducing the Western abstract tradition to “the extreme of subjectivity” — as Sections 5.1–5.2 have done — is incomplete as an argument. This tradition also contains, within itself, a line pursuing “the subject's withdrawal.” When I marked the “parallel” boundary between myself and Western abstraction in Section 5.2 using “outward expression vs. inward return” and “addition vs. subtraction,” I overlooked a key fact: Western abstraction's own attempts at “de-subjectification” look, in direction, consistent with what I call “the subject's withdrawal,” yet are fundamentally different in method.
Malevich's Suprematism pursued the “zero degree of the thing” — reducing painting to its most basic geometric forms, liberating art from the representation of the world, entering a pure order transcending the individual.
Mondrian's Neo-Plasticism pursued “universal pure expression” — through horizontal and vertical lines, and the three primary colors red, yellow, and blue, arriving at a non-personal, cosmic harmony.
Neither of these is “the extreme of subjectivity” — they are attempts to free art from personal emotion, entering an order transcending the individual. In this sense, I share the same problem-consciousness with Malevich and Mondrian: art's core task is not to express the subject, but to let something arrive from outside subjectivity.
But sharing the problem makes the divergence in method all the sharper. Malevich's and Mondrian's “withdrawal of the subject” is achieved by constructing a transcendental, universal, de-personalized order. The geometric form itself is a vessel of “de-personalization” — no matter who draws a square, it is the same square. Order is “manufactured” from outside the subject, and the subject then folds itself into that order.
My “withdrawal of the subject” is not achieved by constructing an order to contain the subject, but by discovering traces never deliberately shaped by any subject, letting the subject, in gazing, loosen and gradually withdraw on its own. I construct no order; I only recognize, within a surface already deposited into order by time, rain, painting, and flaking, that the order was there all along.
One is a transcendental, constructive withdrawal; the other, an empirical, discovered withdrawal.
This difference means: even granting that “de-subjectification” exists within Western abstraction, my relation to it is still not “walking together in the same camp,” but “moving toward the same direction, with different starting points, paths, and destinations” — they set out from geometric order, I set out from forgotten traces; they arrive at universality, I arrive at specificity; they constructed an order anyone can see, I have recognized an order only those willing to stop can see.
Acknowledging this concealed line forces me to revise the crude claim, in Sections 5.1–5.2, that “I am opposed to the entire Western abstract tradition.” A more accurate statement is: I am not opposed to the entire Western abstract tradition — while keeping my distance from its mainstream narrative (expressive abstraction), I share, with one of its tributaries (constructive abstraction), the problem-consciousness of “de-subjectification” — but the ways we arrive at it are entirely different, and the “impersonality” we each finally reach belongs to a different order of being. Western abstraction's constructive withdrawal lets the subject dissolve into a transcendental, universal order; my discovered withdrawal lets the subject, before the specific trace of a thing, temporarily loosen, temporarily step aside. The former leads to universality; the latter, to the specificity of the thing.
5.4 Minimalism: A Fellow Traveler Who Diverges — Manufactured “Impersonality” and Discovered “Impersonality”
Beyond the four lines above — the mainstream narrative of three subjective abstractions, plus one concealed line of constructive withdrawal — there is a line whose relation to me is more complex than “parallel,” more ambiguous than “divergent paths”: Minimalism.
Donald Judd, in 1965, proposed the claim of “specific objects” — a thing, a box, a stacked structure — these are what they are, pointing to nothing beyond themselves.[15] This claim is nearly synonymous with my own “letting the thing show itself.” Judd's metal boxes, Flavin's fluorescent tubes, Andre's floor-laid lead plates — their shared feature: refusing metaphor, refusing expression, refusing to let the thing become a vehicle of meaning. Minimalist artists tried to let the thing be present, in pure materiality, directly, eliminating every trace of personal expression.
In this intention, I am Minimalism's fellow traveler. We both believe art's core task is not to express the subject, but to liberate the thing from the covering of subjectivity. But our similarity stops at intention — a difference in operational method causes us to fork at the very starting point of the same road.
Minimalism's “impersonality” is manufactured. Judd's boxes are industrially fabricated; Flavin's tubes are commercially purchased — their geometric form, surface treatment, material texture are all precisely calculated to eliminate any sense of “handmade” or “personal trace.” This “impersonality” is itself an effect, a manufactured objectivity. Facing a Judd box, the viewer knows it was made by Judd — its “impersonality” is precisely Judd's aesthetic signature.
My “impersonality” is discovered. The mottling, flaking, seepage on a wall are not manufactured by anyone for the purpose of “de-subjectifying.” They simply happened — time, rain, weathering, painting and flaking, deposited in alternation, leaving traces on a material surface. My “withdrawal of the subject” is achieved not by eliminating personal traces within the work, but by turning attention toward forgotten traces — human traces concealed by everyday function, ignored by aesthetic habit, yet continuously deposited on the wall all along.
This difference leads to a deeper distinction: Minimalism needs to actively enter the museum to be seen. Judd's boxes are not found on the street; Flavin's tubes are not found in a warehouse — they are manufactured specifically to enter the exhibition space, to be seen as “art.” My walls were always already there — in the city's streets and alleys, on the side walls of abandoned factories, in corners no one passes through. They need not be “brought into” any space; they need only be noticed.
This raises a more fundamental question: Minimalism pursues the directness of “presence” — letting the thing occupy space through its physical existence; you walk around it, feel its volume, its weight, its relation to the ground. This is a spatial mode of seeing. My wall pursues the transformation of “manifestation” — letting the thing's trace be stripped from everyday cognition, becoming a visual weave to be gazed at. This is a temporal mode of seeing. Judd's box makes you walk; my wall makes you stop. One is the body's movement through space; the other, the eye's sedimentation on a surface.
So my relation to Minimalism is not a simple binary of “manufactured objectivity” vs. “discovered objectivity.” More precisely: we fork at the same starting point — he lets the thing become a thing through “presence”; I let the thing become a thing through “manifestation.” The former is spatial, physical, present; the latter, temporal, perceptual, stripped-out. We are both fellow travelers of “letting the thing become a thing,” but each understands “becoming” differently.
5.5 The Aesthetic Habit Within “Discovered Objectivity”: An Irreducible Residue
Now I must return to a question already touched in Section 1.3 — the aesthetic habit within selection — but this time, it must be re-examined within the context of Minimalism.
Minimalism's “manufactured objectivity” has an advantage I cannot sidestep: it does not conceal its own manufactured nature. Facing a Judd box, the viewer clearly knows this is a calculated, selected, produced thing. That “impersonality” is itself a recognizable manufactured effect. The viewer can critique it, can question it, but will not be “deceived” by it.
What of my own “discovered objectivity”? That wall's mottling looks as though it “was simply always like this.” The viewer may not realize that a “me” — someone who selected, framed, purified — has been present all along. They may mistake the mottling and flaking for something that “was already art,” never seeing that my eye recognized something of its own kind among countless walls — and that recognition itself was already a choice, filtered through aesthetic habit.
This risk becomes sharper against the reference point of Minimalism. Because Minimalism's “manufactured impersonality” and my “discovered impersonality” share, on this one point — not letting the thing appear through subjective projection — the same underlying pursuit. But Minimalism achieves this by declaring its own manufactured nature, while I am manufacturing an illusion of “non-manufacture.” When a viewer believes they are directly facing “the thing itself,” what they actually face is a thing already filtered through my aesthetic habit — and that filtering process has been disguised as “no filtering at all.”
This is the heaviest lesson Minimalism teaches me: Minimalism's objectivity is honest — it does not conceal its manufactured identity. My objectivity must face a harder task — letting the moment of discovery retain its truthfulness, while acknowledging discovery's conditionality. I am no purer than Minimalism. I need, even more than Minimalism, to ask, after every selection: what seized me? Was it that crack calling out to me, or has my eye already been trained to recognize only one particular kind of glow?
This question has no endpoint. Every instant of “I was seized by the wall” is, at the same time, “my eye recognizing something it was trained, since childhood, to recognize.” And the predicament Minimalism exposes is this: precisely because it resembles me, on the surface, in “impersonality,” I must be even more vigilant than Minimalism — because the “impersonality” I present looks “natural,” while theirs looks “manufactured.” The illusion of the natural is more dangerous than the declaration of the manufactured.
So my distance from Minimalism lies not in “who is more de-subjectified,” but in “who faces their own conditionality more honestly” — and, having acknowledged that conditionality, who still chooses to keep working. Minimalism completed a one-time “de-subjectification” at the level of the work; I continually recalibrate the subject's withdrawal, in the ongoing practice of seeing.
VI. A Retelling Through the Thread of Medium: The Convergence of Six Dialogues
The six dialogues above have each surveyed, from a different angle, the distance between my practice and its neighbors. But a deeper question must be raised: do all these differences, in the end, converge on the same origin — the specificity of the medium?
Duchamp used readymades (physical objects); Mono-ha used natural materials (stone, wood, earth); Arte Povera used scrap and everyday materials; the ZERO movement used light, space, and movement; Western abstraction used brush and pigment; Minimalism used industrial products — and the core of my practice is digital photography.
This medial difference is not a trivial detail — it fundamentally determines the most basic difference between my “readymade abstraction” and all of the practices above. This essay's surveying has, by this point, already established that medial difference is root-level. But “root-level” does not equal “necessary” — why is this medium irreplaceable? This is precisely the boundary of this essay. I mark, in the convergence of Chapter Six, the point where medial difference converges; the positive argument for “why it must be digital photography” — including the vanishing of indexicality and its remedy, the temptation of immediate feedback and its discipline, the violence of the transformative rupture and the compensation of holographic memory, the disembodiment implicit in pixel-level responsiveness, and the paradox of ordinariness as both a tool of demystification and a form of complicity with consumption — will be unfolded, one by one, in this essay's companion piece, Why It Must Be Digital Photography: The Medial Ontology of Readymade Abstraction and Perceptual Critique. This essay's contribution is to give the judgment “medial difference is fundamental” a solid surveying foundation; that companion study will provide the substantial argument for that judgment.
Duchamp's readymade is a physical presence; my readymade is an image representation. Duchamp produces a rupture of context by moving an object; I produce a perceptual dissociation by fixing a gaze.
Mono-ha's thing is touchable; my thing is seen. Mono-ha juxtaposes thing with thing in space, letting the viewer walk around; I gaze at the same surface in time, letting the viewer stop.
Arte Povera's material is transformed; my wall is purified. Arte Povera awakens the thing's poetry through physical intervention; I let the thing emerge from everyday cognition through perceptual subtraction.
The ZERO movement's light is manufactured; my light is recorded. The ZERO movement creates a field of light; I wait for light's natural manifestation on the wall.
Abstract painting's abstraction — whether the subjective projection of expressive abstraction or the transcendental order of constructive abstraction — is created, differing only in how it is created upon the canvas; my abstraction is discovered, recognized within an already-existing trace. The painter constructs abstraction on a blank canvas; I recognize abstraction within an existing trace.
Minimalism's thing is a manufactured “impersonality”; my thing is a discovered “impersonality.” Minimalism eliminates subjective traces through industrial products; I let the subject withdraw by gazing at forgotten traces — but this “discovery” always carries an aesthetic gene I cannot eliminate, and therefore requires continuous vigilance.
If the dialogues of the first five chapters were a horizontal surveying — marking differences at the level of concept and method — then this chapter is a vertical convergence: following the thread of medium, restringing the six dialogues together, letting the reader see that the most fundamental difference between my practice and Duchamp, Mono-ha, Arte Povera, the ZERO movement, Western abstraction, and Minimalism ultimately converges on the same origin: medial difference determines an ontological difference in how the thing is presented.
Photography's transformative rupture — turning a three-dimensional, touchable thing, situated within the flow of time, into a two-dimensional, visual, frozen image — is the material precondition for everything I do. Without this transformative rupture, my “stripping-away” could not occur: the wall would always remain a wall, not a visual weave of mottling and flaking. At the same time, photography's indexicality — that-has-been — guarantees the reality of my “encounter”: I am not painting an imagined wall, but once stood before a real one.
This means: the difference between myself and these other six lines is, in the end, not a difference of concept, but a difference of medium. Duchamp can place a urinal in a gallery; Mono-ha can place a stone on a museum floor; Minimalism can manufacture a metal box — they depend on the thing's physical presence. I depend on the thing's visual representation. This difference is not a question of “which way is better,” but of “different media promise different modes of manifestation.”
6.1 The Negative Weight of the Medium: Estrangement as Condition
And yet I must directly answer a deeper question: the viewer faces “the wall's shadow,” not “the wall's body” — does this not mean my practice remains forever confined within a “translated aesthetics,” watching a secondary, two-dimensional projection of the thing through a pane of glass?
Yes — this is precisely the fate of the photographic medium. I cannot offer the wall's touch, its temperature, its circumnavigable spatiality. My image cancels every physical dimension of the thing's presence, imprisoning the viewer within the domain of pure vision. This is not a flaw needing repair — it is the core condition that makes perceptual critique possible at all.
Let me explain why. If the viewer faced the real wall body — a three-dimensional wall you could touch, walk around, knock on — the wall's physical existence would continually pull the viewer back to the everyday cognition “this is a wall.” Touch tells you it is rough; temperature tells you it is cool; space tells you that you can walk around it. All of this information reinforces the same fact: “this is a wall.” Everyday cognition is established precisely through this undivided physical perception.
And photography cancels all of this. When a viewer faces an image of a wall, touch, temperature, and spatiality are all severed. The viewer has only vision left — pure, isolated, with no other sense to depend on. The wall is no longer a “touchable thing” — it becomes a woven texture of mottling and flaking. Everyday cognition loses its every anchor, and seeing is pushed into a suspended state: “I don't know whether this is a wall or something else, but I cannot look away.”
It is precisely this “deprivation of presence” that forces the viewer into pure seeing. Estrangement is not an obstruction — estrangement is the condition that makes stripping-away possible. If a viewer could reach out and touch that wall, they would never truly “see” it — they would only “use” it (as a wall). It is precisely because the image cannot be touched that it becomes a field of pure vision.
But this does not mean the sense of estrangement can be entirely dissolved. The viewer still knows this is a photograph — they are aware they face not the wall itself, but the wall's “shadow.” This awareness is itself a residual estrangement, reminding the viewer: you are looking at a photograph, you are not before the wall. And yet this self-awareness of “looking at a photograph” can, precisely, be transformed into another kind of awareness: you are looking at “your looking.” The image cancels the wall's presence, yet makes it impossible to avoid the act of seeing itself. Your gaze falls on paper, and you become aware that you are looking — that awareness is the beginning of perceptual critique.
One critic has observed that every technical medium performs a kind of reduction upon living perception.[16] I agree with this judgment. But it is precisely within this reduction that the dimensions of perception concealed in everyday life are able to manifest. Photography cannot offer the presence of the thing, but it offers a more thorough field of stripping-away — a field in which seeing, no longer disturbed by touch, temperature, or space, can only return to itself.
So my response to the “negative weight of the medium” is not “I can eliminate the estrangement,” but: estrangement is not a flaw needing repair — it is the core condition on which my practice stands. I accept that the viewer will always remain behind that pane of glass, because the thickness of that glass is precisely the depth at which stripping-away occurs. If “the field of no-sensation” is the vast, silent foundation of my creative work, then the medium's estrangement may be precisely the deep source of that field of no-sensation — not an accidental obstacle, but a necessary fate.
Conclusion: The Meaning of Surveying
The six dialogues above are not meant to prove my practice “more correct” or “more profound” than Duchamp, Mono-ha, Arte Povera, the ZERO movement, the Western abstract tradition, or Minimalism. They only mark, on the map, a more precise distance.
I share, with Duchamp, the problem-consciousness of “beyond the retina,” but I choose to let seeing empty out rather than letting concept enter — at the same crossroads, we walk toward different depths;
I share, with Mono-ha, a respect for thingness, but my “resonant communion” points toward the dissolution of perception rather than an ontological relation, and my work unfolds in time rather than space;
I share, with Arte Povera's Pistoletto, the intention of “changing the structure of seeing,” but his mirror painting is a reflection and bodily participation of seeing, while my gaze is a forgetting of seeing;
I share, with Kounellis, the impulse of “letting the thing manifest,” but he displaces the thing, while I redirect seeing;
I share, with the ZERO movement, a direction toward “objectification,” but my objectivity is disclosure rather than production;
I neighbor the mainstream narrative of the Western abstract tradition in visual form, but my abstraction is discovered rather than created — even within the tributary of Western abstraction that pursues constructive withdrawal, they create a transcendental order, while I recognize a forgotten trace;
I share, with Minimalism, the intention of “letting the thing become a thing,” but his thing is a manufactured presence, while my thing is a discovered manifestation — and that “discovery” always carries an aesthetic gene I cannot eliminate, requiring even more sustained vigilance than Minimalism's.
These differences are not a ranking of superiority, but a forking of paths. And the forking of paths is worth marking precisely because it lets the position where “the Returner” stands become clearer — not defined in opposition to anyone, but recognized through the precise distance at which I neighbor, and diverge from, each of these lines.
And the completion of this recognition is precisely what lets me see clearly the direction of the next step: once all this horizontal surveying is in place, I need to turn to a vertical inquiry — not “how do I differ from others,” but “why do I work this way.” The medial difference this essay has revealed will acquire its own independent argumentative dimension in my subsequent writing.
And yet, at the close, I must confess a methodological paradox. I say “I am not on the extension of anyone's line” — this is an honest judgment of my own independent position. But in this essay, the method I have used to locate myself is precisely to draw one line of reference after another: I am someone's fork, someone's divergent path, someone's parallel. This paradox — dissolving boundaries by drawing them — is not a logical flaw, but the fate of discourse itself: to demonstrate that “I stand only within the fissure,” I must first demonstrate what stands on either side of that fissure.
And deeper still: even once the surveying is complete, those reference lines themselves still carry an aesthetic gene I cannot eliminate — I mark my position by drawing boundaries, and the act of drawing a boundary is, itself, already a position. In the Duchamp section, I acknowledged the aesthetic habit within “selection”; in the Minimalism section, I questioned the pre-conscious projection within “discovery” — these two moments of questioning are not isolated instances of reflection, but a continuous vigilance running throughout the entire survey. Every end of every reference line is not only an “other,” but also a reflection of myself. I am willing to bear this double paradox, and to treat it as a form of methodological honesty: I do not derive my value from comparison with anyone, but confirm the coordinate at which I stand through the precise distance to my neighbors — while remaining clear-eyed that the selection of that coordinate is, itself, already part of the coordinate.
The surveying is complete. That point on the map is clearer now than before. But a map, in the end, is only a map. That wall is still in its place. After all this comparison and surveying, I still must return to that wall — carrying no “-ism” label, no “movement” reference, only a pair of eyes trying to empty themselves.
All of these dialogues point, in the end, toward the same conclusion: I am not the extension of anyone's line — I am only a person standing within a fissure. And that fissure is not in the distance between Duchamp and myself, not in the fork between Mono-ha and myself, not in the parallel between Western abstraction and myself, not at either end of any reference line — it is in every specific, silent, fruitless gaze.
In this sense, my “surveying” and my “return” point in the same direction. Surveying draws boundaries outward; return traces sources inward. And when I walk inward to the deepest point, the person I meet — illiterate, pounding rice in the mill room, saying originally there is not one thing — needs no surveying at all. He is already within the fissure.
The road is on no map.
The road comes from walking.
Translator's Notes
[1] Duchamp's phrase describing what he called “retinal art” — art meant “only to please the eye” — is widely attested across interviews, including Pierre Cabanne's Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (1967; English trans. 1971). Quoted directly here as a short (five-word) phrase from this source.
[2] Duchamp's characterization of post-1880 art as operating within the “retinal category,” reduced to sensuous feeling, is likewise drawn from the interview literature (again principally Cabanne). Paraphrased here rather than quoted directly, since note 1 already draws a direct quotation from this same source; this project's copyright practice permits at most one direct quotation per source, with all further material from that source rendered as paraphrase.
[3] Duchamp's statement regarding 3 Standard Stoppages and his aversion to “retinal” painting is rendered here as paraphrase rather than reconstructed quotation.
[4] Duchamp's remarks on the Bicycle Wheel — that he enjoyed spinning it as he passed, comparing it to watching a fire in a fireplace — are drawn from interview sources and rendered here as paraphrase.
[5] Duchamp's proposal of a “reciprocal readymade” — using a Rembrandt painting as an ironing board — is a well-attested remark from his notes, rendered here as paraphrase.
[6] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (French: La Chambre claire, 1980; English trans. Richard Howard, 1981), develops the concept of ça-a-été (“that-has-been”) as photography's distinguishing ontological claim. Rendered here as paraphrase rather than reconstructed quotation from either the French original or Howard's English translation.
[7] Lee Ufan's writings on the thing's mode of existing “in contact with the world” rather than as object are drawn from his theoretical essays (collected in English as The Art of Encounter, among other volumes) and rendered here as paraphrase.
[8] On Lee Ufan's grounding in Heideggerian and Merleau-Pontian phenomenology and in Nishida Kitōrō's philosophy, see the secondary scholarly literature on Mono-ha, e.g. studies by Mika Yoshitake and others.
[9] Nobuo Sekine's remark distinguishing his “thing” from Duchamp's readymade (that Duchamp's objects retain functionality, while his own works are “thing” with no functionality at all) is drawn from published interviews and rendered here as paraphrase.
[10] Michelangelo Pistoletto's statement that “there is no time between a body and its reflection in a mirror” appears already in English in the source text and is quoted directly here, being under fifteen words and the only quotation drawn from this particular source.
[11] Otto Piene's description of the ZERO movement's aim as creating “a zone of silence and pure possibility, for a new beginning” is rendered here as paraphrase.
[12] Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), develops the famous comparison of color to piano keys, the eye to the hammer, and the soul to the piano. Rendered here as paraphrase rather than reconstructed quotation of any specific published English translation.
[13] Jackson Pollock's widely quoted remark that while “in” his painting he is not aware of what he is doing is drawn from his 1947 statement published in Possibilities magazine. Rendered here as paraphrase.
[14] Mark Rothko's statement that he is interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom — is a widely quoted remark from his 1947 essay “The Romantics Were Prompted.” Rendered here as paraphrase.
[15] Donald Judd, “Specific Objects” (Arts Yearbook 8, 1965), is the foundational essay of Minimalist theory. The claim rendered in paraphrase here — that a specific object is what it is and not something else — is central to that essay's argument.
[16] The unattributed critical observation regarding technical media as a “reduction” of living perception is presented in the original as an unnamed critic's remark, without citation; rendered here as paraphrase, consistent with the source text's own lack of specific attribution.