The work by Brice Marden that had genuinely caught my eye was the series Cold Mountain. In the early 1980s, he had traveled to Thailand, India, and Sri Lanka, and became interested in Asian landscape and culture. Since then, Marden came across the calligraphy of a poem by the Tang Dynasty Chinese poet-monk Han Shan(寒山), and he was deeply moved by his life, poems, and calligraphy (Cold Mountain is the translation of the Chinese characters for Han Shan:寒山). Inspired by the calligraphy, Marden created a series that  conjures up the image of letters. Once he stated how it is hard to look at paintings: "You have to be able to bring all sorts of things together in your mind, your imagination, in your whole body … " When he would install his large sized works, the height of the canvas would match the viewer's height, in order to enhance the dynamics between his work and the viewer's body. His Cold Mountain series did just that; it felt as if I had met each painting with my physical presence.

I have always loved Chinese characters, ever since I was a child. They were like drawings to me. When you write them out, it feels like a composition is forming. In each character, a certain plasticity was there. When I learned English words by heart, it felt like memorizing signs, whereas for Chinese characters, it was like memorizing pictures. And I was good at it. After college, living in New York for years, I forgot a lot of Chinese characters that I used to know. From a certain point on, I found myself looking at them, rather than reading them. It was not pleasant to feel rather ignorant and illiterate, but the more I could see these characters as drawings, the more discernible the form was   to my eyes. As the meaning became an image, the burden of meaning itself disappeared; only the concrete nature of the drawing remained. When I look at the characters like I would at drawings by Matisse or Picasso, I could enjoy looking at them even though I could not read them. Hence Brice Marden's Cold Mountain series amplified my 'joy of illiteracy' in a pictorial and spectacular manner.

Han Shan was a legendary monk-poet of the Tang Dynasty, presumed to be a figure of the 9th century. He lived in the premises of Guoqing Temple with monks Shide(拾得) and Fenggan(豊干), and they were called the "Three Recluses of Guoqing". Han Shan lived inside a cave and ate leftover rice and vegetables from the temple, and wore the same hemp clothes and clogs whether it was summer or winter. He would go around and write poems on trees and rocks. He was known to be a great thinker well-versed in Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. An example of his poem:


吾心似秋月 My mind is like the autumn moon

碧潭淸皎潔 The blue pond is clear and clean

無物堪比倫 Nothing can compare with this

敎我如何說 How should I be told and educated otherwise?


From early on, Marden was interested in the rectangular form of the canvas and grids. When he was making sketches for Cold Mountain, he perceived the shape of the Chinese poem as a grid and began drawing each letter in the shape of an upside down conch. As in calligraphy, top to bottom, right to left. Without knowing each letter's sound or meaning, he had drawn the form of letters as if drawing a human body. He used sticks like Jackson Pollock did. Whereas Pollock used a stick to splatter paint, Marden attached a paintbrush to a stick longer than 60cm, and used it  to paint. It was his intention to give up control of his agile hands and invite unexpected movements. He would paint on the canvas, and a thin white coat over the lines, then paint on them again, using the slightly visible drawings as a guide. Looped curves resembling Chinese characters untangle onto the canvas as if dancing. When they are linked to different forms, eyes follow them, and the freedom and sense of rhythm felt by the body are tremendous.

Pollock laid the canvas on the floor, and used sticks to splash paint while walking around the canvas. He was aware of the zen state of becoming one with his work. Pollock's method is evaluated as the event that overcame the Western dualistic idea of the mind/body. In fact, the expression "abstract art" has often been pointed out as an incorrect term in this regard. Such works where the materiality of the medium and the movement of the body are in harmony, are the most concrete types of paintings. Marden had transferred his interest in classical proportions and subtle color studies that he had delved into in Hydra onto an Asian landscape through the series Cold Mountain. In all the Asian calligraphy and paintings he observed, they embodied the subtle colors of nature he was immersed in. From the life of Han Shan who abandoned his desires for self, Marden gained the pictorial freedom of 'knowing myself is forgetting myself.' Drawing is the most intimate and direct way to create art, and the distance between the artist and the work is the narrowest in this state. Marden realized Eastern calligraphy through Western drawing, and thus developed it into a new type of painting. It explores the relationship between body and soul in the Western painting realm, and superimposes the 'rarefied state' of the air of the Aegean Sea, where Greek and Roman languages intersect onto an Asian space. Whenever his lines dance in a large parabolic curve, to meet and break up, the olive trees of Hydra and the autumn landscape cherished by Han Shan merge and then distance themselves. Indeed, what we see is a mystic encounter between the Mediterranean sky and the state of zen.