Eternity
Media
Digital mixed media on archival paper
Size
20" x 24" x 1.5"
Artist
Jing Zhou
Organization/Affilitaion
Monmouth University
Location
New Jersey, USA
About

The Ch’an Mind, Zen Mind series reflects my spiritual experience about Ch’an, known as Zen. It expresses my present perception and intuition toward the ultimate reality. My images form a visual communication that interacts in several collective dialogues. Theses dialogues are between eternity and transience, oneness and variety, existence and emptiness.

As a Chinese artist living in the Western world, I am aware of art and philosophy from both cultures. Developing a personal visual language that expresses universal ideas, I create artworks for the sake of my own spirit, for color and arrange in each image, and for making visible the concepts that gave birth to the images. I want my viewers to look at my images through magical windows into a deep, secondary space.

Creating artwork requires me to realize my true nature, which gives me a new perspective on life. It has also challenged me to constantly solve visual problems, learn new techniques, and explore the splendid human heritage.

Beyond various techniques and conceptions, the process of creating and making art has enchanted me. At the core of my art is an attempt to attain moments of transcendence, to reach artless-art, emptiness, self-unconsciousness, and self-forgetfulness. In other words, artistic creation is a process of expressing my true nature via “being” human.

Technical Notes

Although the final digital files were create in Adobe Photoshop, traditional media were involved for preparing raw materials before digital manipulation; printmaking, photography, painting, drawing, and natural textures.