Liu Kincheloe

Liu Kincheloe

The term horror vacui, commonly understood as the fear of empty space, comes up a lot in relation to my work. It reminds me of the Art Historical narrative I learned in school that judged early works against a Greco-Roman ideal, and then almost skipped ahead to Renaissance art and Enlightenment Thinking. I remember learning about these arbitrary markers that were seen as the final pinnacles of development and a correction to any previous viewpoints, judging the artistic development of entire civilizations based on whether concepts like linear perspective were employed, or whether their figures showed signs of contrapposto. This struck me as hubris, as if the entire discipline might be a complex of cultural bias about rationalist thought in this refusal to take things on their own terms. I identified with the “othered” qualities and still do. I like mysticism. It seems natural to consider porosity and multiplicity as fundamental qualities of mind. I play with subverting figure/ground relationships as a meditation, training myself to look at things with less centrality and to recognize that what I decide is the important “figure” and relegated “ground” are a part of necessary mental functions that ultimately create equally arbitrary value judgments.

In a mandala or a pattern, the inter-relationship of form within pattern is special because adjacent forms co-create each other—positive form and negative space become interchangeable in daisy-chain. Interwoven designs always relate to textile because that is their highest form—where their making, warp and weft, further reiterate the design. These sorts of patterns can feel impenetrable because of the way we are trained to relate to things, and that there isn’t a heavy, obvious priority. I employ my own handedness with its irregularity and error to open up these patterns to create entry into the work, but I feel that this way of looking might be something worth getting used to. Chöngyam Trungpa speaks of the mandala effect, saying that “It is a way of looking at situations in terms of relativity: if this exists, that exists; if that exists, this exists. Things exist interdependently and that interdependent existence of things happens as orderly chaos.”