I  C h i n g / 易經

Gallery owners, artists and prospects have advised me to make small sized paintings. I never wanted to do this because it felt limiting and too decorative.
But recently I wanted to challenge myself and now they’re done, I feel that they do add something.
This small series is called “I Ching” and consists of 8 pieces.

I had a lot of small panels made and got 8 of them in my studio, not thinking of a series yet.
In the mind of one of my favorite contemporary composers -John Cage- I wanted to involve the I Ching*.
In a library I found a German edition, opened it up “at random” and saw a picture of 8 hexagrams, in this case referring to the points of the compass.
These had to be my pieces but since two of the panels are two times bigger, I thought of the poem “The Ballad of East and West” by Rudyard Kipling.

Often only the first line or first two lines are quoted:

“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;”

But the lines that follow might give one a far more positive conclusion:

“But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!”

The hexagrams and the last two lines in the poem are written in some layers of all the paintings.
The bigger panels are called Li (East) and Kan (West).