Everything emerges from space. Everything returns to space. I don’t mean outer space. I mean space in general.
The Daoist sage Liezi (c. 5th century BCE) said primordial space was filled with energy (37.0). Energy transforms endlessly but is neither created nor destroyed. Just as science speaks of spacetime, perhaps we can speak of “energyspace.” Liezi wrote:
“The ancient sages said that heaven and earth were controlled by yin and yang, and that form came from the formless. So where did heaven and earth come from?
“I explain it like this: “There was a great transformation. There was a great origin. There was a great beginning. There was a great root.
“Before the great transformation, there was no energy yet. Then came the great origin and the beginning of energy. That great beginning produced great form. That led to the great root—and the start of all matter.”
Each of us is formed in the empty space of the womb. Our lungs are like bellows—empty space to draw air in and breathe it out. Our hearts pump blood through chambers and into arteries. We occupy space our entire lives. We move through space for all our lives. When we die, we enter the space of the casket or urn. In time, we dissolve completely into space as every particle of us recombines with others. We are born from space and we return to space.
The designer, the architect, the artist, the calligrapher, the musician the dancer—they all subdivide space for their whole lives. They arrange spaces, assemble spaces, make marks across space. Every work is unique and can never be the “ultimate”—look how the process of reference, allusion, and appropriation go on.
Furthermore, new art will always be made. You will divide space your way today, Tomorrow, someone else will divide it differently. The sizes of blank paper have been standardized, but no two drawings made on the same size of paper will ever be identical.
The musician enters the space of silence, dividing it into movements, bars, beats, and notes. Rests are tiny spaces embedded in music. The writer needs spaces between words to render their texts intelligible, to set stanzas apart, and to divide chapters. The dancer moves through space, but they also compose in negative space (the space surrounding form).
Our society functions by selling space: a seat in a restaurant, a plane, a school. A house. Land. Freedom in a city like New York is access to limited spaces—if you want it, you must have the money and privilege for it. If you transgress, prison is the severe curtailing of space—and solitary confinement is considered inhumane because it is isolation in a small space. But there’s the space of nature, which no one can own. There’s the space of a free mind, which no one else can enter or control.
In antiquity, the tombs were not just final resting places but were regarded as transitional spaces to the afterlife (37.1). In the museums, we see a continual division of spaces and a contemplation of what those divisions mean (37.2). In an Egyptian sarcophagus, we see not only the space but also the images that were thought to be necessary to accompany the dead (37.3). The 9/11 Memorial asks us to contemplate the space of the destroyed tower and the loss of those wrongly killed (37.4). In art, whether a Japanese splashed ink painting or a painting of a Madonna with child, we see plenty of “left-over” space made active and inseparable from the “positive space” of the subject (37.5).
Nothing stands forever. Our works may last for thousands of years, and they’re still the diving of space. Each person born will keep taking up space and they will keep dividing space. They will go through the stages of life, each of which is also a space, and then they will make space for others.
We are taught that emptiness—space—is one of the goals of meditation. We are taught that emptiness—space—preceded the universe. Could you take your inner emptiness and expand it to the infinite space of the universe? All divisions are there, but they are temporary forms. When they dissolve or change, it’s movement within space. By having a dynamic involvement with space on a daily level, we unify our spirits.
Space may take form. It may dissolve back into sheer power. It is perpetual. I recall these lines from the “Heart Sutra”:
色即是空。 空即是色。
Se ji shi kong. Kong ji shi se.
These lines are usually translated as: “Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form.”
On closer study, the word, se, 色, also means, “color; look; appearance.” That still fits with “form,” but in the context of art, it deliciously invokes color and shape. Emptiness, kong, 空, can also mean “space; air; sky; vacant.”
Philosophically, you could read this as “appearances are empty and emptiness is appearance.” This means that emptiness and appearances are inseparable and that there is no absolute truth to any appearance. That doesn’t mean that our experiences are unreal. It means that our experiences are not permanent, that they are variable, and that they are relative.
The ideogram is kong, 空, combines “cave,” 穴, with “work,” 工. Conventionally, 工, only has a phonetic role. But in looking at the juxtaposition, we can imagine an empty space where work takes place (physics defines energy as, “ability to do work, which is the ability to exert a force causing displacement of an object.”) Space could be a studio, an event—or a lifetime. The range of energy goes from universal energy to our personal efforts. The Daoists see space and energy together. All transformations are within space. All transformations come from space.
Form is space. Space is form.
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Splashed-Ink Landscape. Bokushō Shūshō (Japanese, active late 15th–early 16th century). Muromachi period (1392–1573). early 16th century. Japan. Hanging scroll; ink on paper. 31 1/2 × 13 3/8 in. (80 × 33.9 cm). TheMet.
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/53228
Madonna and Child. Duccio di Buoninsegna (Italian, active by 1278–died 1318 Siena). ca. 1290–1300. Tempera and gold on wood. 11 x 8 1/4 in. (27.9 x 21 cm). TheMet.
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/438754?pkgids=942