“The eyes of animals have the power of a vast language.”
M. Buber
Heraclitus of Ephesus was certainly saying something novel when he said, “everything flows” or “you cannot step into the same river twice” in a Greek world filled with gods and myth. He was turning eyes directly towards nature itself. He was hinting at a concept of nature without a Deux Machina, a moving and acting God. Everything was in an endless flow and transformation. There was no room for capricious gods in this world. Looking at nature was a lever for the groundbreaking philosophical studies of Ionia; it was a brand-new perspective.
Meanwhile, the ancient East was after different solutions. They also gave the same value to the concept of “stillness” or “void.” What actually turns the wheel is the space between the spokes. Pure “void” is also the home of inaction. Opposite to the West’s space filled with an empowered subject, there’s a universe perception like the voids formed by light brush strokes in a Chinese painting. Mountains, trees, winding rivers are not dependent on the action of a strong and dominant Subject. Emptiness turns Fullness into a breeze. Like the subjectlessness in haikus, said plainly and simply by Zen. It’s not the subject and will that speak first, but nature and animals; or the silence of a stone… A universe perception outside the Western arrogance of “man is the measure of all things.” Haiku does not impose a meaning or Subject.
As moonlight penetrates
An empty bamboo is growing
And a cuckoo cries.
Like in Basho’s haiku, this is a humble and clear perception.
Ah, summer grasses
All that remains
From the dreams of warriors.
Subject is sometimes only a slight leak.
The Zen Circle… Rough and incomplete… India ink, the hand gripping the brush… The latent power of possibility… The West will understand the power of brush strokes and improvisation and also the void in the 19th century. How late! Zen is open to improvisation; it is outside the circle (sphere) form that is the most perfect form coming from Plato in Western modernity. It posesses no sharp lines; only paths.
Azat Yeman displays a rich ecology before our eyes with animal figures. The etymology of ecology is also very meaningful. “Ecology” has its roots in the ancient Greek οἶκος (oikos), “home, near environment”; -λογία, (logia) “science.” The knowledge of our home, in short! How meaningful and intense. Nature, where nearly everything quickly changes and who is consumed by capitalist rationality, is also our home.
The title Azat Yeman found fitting for the exhibition is Wu wei (Chinese: 無為; pinyin: wúwéi), meaning “actionless, effortless, inert”. The concept describes attaining clarity by not intervening in the flow of nature and aligning with it. Azat Yeman’s figures, his “animas,” namely animals, experience “actionlessness” as a fullness.
Animals look at us with all their curiosity. Rhinoceros, giraffe, lizards, deer, the sloth with its utter charm, panda, and many more. What is the gaze of an animal anyway? It’s as shocking as the gaze of the donkey in one of cinema history’s classics, Robert Bresson’s “Au Hasard Balthazar.” Is it possible not to see the innocence and curiosity in the eyes of an animal, no matter how wild?
Balthazar’s gaze is a ruthless one against being enslaved, violence, whips, the burdens on his back…
The gaze that we share genetic kinship with in the animals looking at us amidst Azat’s colorful embroideries. No matter how tame they look, they strike like the “wild” flare of an uncivilizable nature.
The artist sometimes places globules in the mouths of animals, giving the impression of chewing gum balloons. The ultimate idea in the mouth: Circle or Sphere…
The Sphere; the voice of Civilization that suppresses the animal and nature with its flawless form… Your origin lays in shaping stone and smoothing it. So, shaping and building cities. To be civil!
Azat’s bubbles. It’s also pointing to a silenced mouth. Ecology and nature keeping silent. Our home, that is. Or our holy mother.