Page 18 - Art First: Simon Morley: Lost Horizon

For the unified and delineated space of Western art, East Asian landscape paint-
ings like Ahn Gyeon’s substitute the emptiness or voids of clouds and mists, and
the mobility of multiple perspectives. But they do not only show the indistinct

beyond into which forms vanish at the horizon, as would be the case within the
conventions of Western landscape painting, but rather generate a sense of activity,
and the possibility of exchanges and interaction between forms, and of the
abridged, suggested and invisible. e void in East Asian art points towards per -

cep tion at a level of undifferentiation–where there is no horizon. It is a liquid and
permeable space of the ‘in-between’, and such in-between-ness suggests a move-
ment within the visible that is closely bound to respiration—to breathing in–
breath ing out. e Cartesian trope of the horizon, describing the limit placed on

what can be known, is challenged by another trope describing the ability to link
inside and outside. It suggests that knowledge comes by fully immersing our-
selves in what Maurice Merleau-Ponty called the ‘flesh of the world’.

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e ultimate end of visions of a perfect community or society is to con front the

intermittent and seemingly random processes that characterize expe ri ence. Such
idealizing formulae stubbornly resist the ceaseless attrition of the present on our
lives in favour of rigid and consoling convictions about the past and the future.

We can become so locked into seeing something in one particular way that

we will not be able to see any other pattern, or acknowledge the validity of any