Resumen de Shifting Biographies, Shifting Temporalities
The writer responds to Jonathan Hay's article, in this issue, on the role of mediation in an artwork, specifically in the painting A Solitary Temple below Brightening Peaks (Qingluan xiaosi). Hay views the work of art itself as continually generating and inhabiting new contexts. He stresses the tension inherent in the ink monochrome painting medium, which pulls the viewer back and forth between interest in the painting's surface and the quality of brushwork, on the one hand, and concern for the optical and illusionistic force of its technique and its subject matter, on the other. This oscillation, along with the carefully arranged shifting perspectives that allow the eye to move around the landscape in a way that mimics the experience of a traveler, creates a temporalization of space, a built-in instability. Hay's exploration of the painting as a Buddhist icon enmeshed in a web of Confucian commentary is also explored.
