COMPLETE OR INCOMPLETE?

REFLECTIONS ON ART AND IMAGINATION

Paul Serfaty

Art may stimulate by way of the reactions of others, especially when those reactions seem to
one viewer the opposite of what his experience would have led him to expect, especially if that
other is someone one respects. Can a work of art that does not appear complete to one viewer
really be said to be ‘incomplete’ if the actual effect created is the artist’s aim?

In Western art, especially in oil painting in the pictorial tradition, but also in the modern
movement, the work of the painter is generally expected to cover the canvas. In one sense these
works are complete. In another, as a result of the narrow definition by the artist himself of what
he wishes to achieve, they may be said to be incomplete. Jacques-Louis David’s Consecration
of the Emperor Napoleon I and the Crowning Coronation of the Empress Joséphine in Notre-
Dame 1804, painted in 1806-07 is very large, in both title and size (6.21m x 9.79m). Colourful,
dramatic, on its terms, very complete. But it deals with the event. As a semi-propaganda piece,
it is more concerned with effect and political symbolism than the universe outside of itself.

By contrast, in a different culture, both scale and complexity may be renounced, and alternative
ways of seeing adopted, as for example in the case of the famous work of Sengai:1

1 Sengai Gibon 1750-1837, a Japanese monk of the Rinzai school one of three main schools of Zen Buddhism in Japan
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Not only culture, but medium, may affect one’s perception of what is complete or incomplete.
Watercolours, drawing and printmaking generate slightly different expectations in the viewer,
but in those fields too, the basic assumption remains, that a work will convey the substance of
what is shown, without leaving ‘unsightly’ gaps in the presentation of a thing or of a concept or
of an emotion. Botticelli left no gaps, and Jackson Pollock few. Format matters too. The
triptych as reconceived by Francis Bacon shows that a single canvas, apparently sufficient in
itself, may in fact be the incomplete expression of an artist’s intent. The development of Cubism
reminds us that even such basic
elements as the picture plane and single
point perspective are not complete
representations of a scene, even in
something as apparently simple as a
still life. One might put forward
Manet’s The Fife Player or David’s (in
fact unfinished) Death of Bara (right)
to demonstrate the subjective effect in
a work by a master who may leave
substantial portions ‘unfinished’, but
the main point remains: a truly
unfinished work is very different from
a work that deliberately embraces
ambiguity and openness.

Collage, photography and film can do things differently. Collage is by definition a not
necessarily physically well-fitted assemblage, as Motherwell or Schwitters’ work shows.
Photographers such as Australia’s Bill Henson may create photo-assemblages. Film, though it
rarely eschews use of the entire screen, is able though the edit to emphasise the incompleteness
of any single scene in relation to the whole. Even the single screen film can be considered
incomplete, as was demonstrated as long ago as 1927 by Abel Gance’s film ‘Napoleon’ which
projected on up to three screens simultaneously. And the very existence of multi-media art, and
the debate in Richard Strauss’ ‘Capriccio’ over what makes opera more complete (conversely,
comes first: words? or music?) demonstrates that at some level, everything, including every
work of art is an abstraction of reality.

Apart from whether an artist chooses to use the

space available on a canvas or a sheet of paper to
the fullest extent available, there is also the
question of when he stops painting or drawing.
When is the work ‘complete’? The most basic
answer will be ‘when it is to the artist’s
satisfaction’. In oils and acrylics, that may be a
matter of degree, as the artist can rework a
painting relatively extensively, and even overpaint
completely, if he chooses. That will obviously not
work well in watercolour, and in Chinese ink
painting the artist will discard a painting if it has
not developed well, as rectifying a misjudgement
is generally very difficult. Similarly, a drawing is
a highly exposed artform, and though Robert
Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing
shows there is plenty of scope for the artist to
demand2 the absolute right to determine what is
true completion, in general corrections and erasings don’t help the sense that the artist has got it
right, if they become necessary. In metalpoint, corrections are impossible.

2 As San Francisco MOMA points out: “…of all the 30,000-plus works in SFMOMA’s collection, it is easily the most requested for

exhibition and reproduction.” http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2015/11/who-owns-erased-de-kooning-drawing/

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However, even in oil painting, a work can be judged complete at many different stages and in
many different ways. When did Jackson Pollock decide the dripping could stop? How could any
other person tell him what was the right time to stop? Which particular density and combination
of overlapping irregular dripped trails of paint of different colours was right?

Pollock knew – and we now know from computer based analysis of his works that he knew
consistently and differentiably3 - what he wanted and when he had achieved it.

Francis Bacon’s technique most frequently involved painting on the unprimed side of the
canvas, and often applying the minimum level of paint to achieve the effect he desired. In his
Papal Portraits of 1953,
based on the portrait of
Pope Innocent X by
Velasquez that Bacon
so admired, the power
of the effects he
achieved clearly did not
depend on an image
covering the entire
space, dense impasto or
finely worked detail:
quite the opposite of
David’s Consecration.
The power derives
from the rawness
(Portrait V, right), the
directness, the lack of
any need for decorative
device – though
decoration is there,
technically, in the gold
finials of the Pope’s
chair (Portrait VIII, left) sketched onto the canvas in the thinnest layer of paint carrying an
intentional sense of almost tenuous attachment to the canvas. No one could say these paintings

3 John Timmer, International Journal of Art and Technology, February, 2015 http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/02/computer-

algorithm-can-accurately-identify-jackson-pollock-paintings/ - last accessed at 30 July, 2016

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are not complete. Yet, as philosopher-critic Gilles Deleuze reminds us in his assessment of
Bacon’s use of space and his refusal to fill the space surrounding his figure in the normal way:4

We are still at the simple aspect of isolation. A Figure is isolated within a ring, upon a
chair, bed, or sofa, inside a circle or parallelepiped. It occupies only a part of the
painting. What then fills the rest of the painting? A certain number of possibilities are
already annulled, or without interest, for Bacon. What fills the rest of the painting will
be neither a landscape as the correlate of the Figure, nor a ground from which the form
will emerge, nor a formless chiaroscuro, a thickness of color on which shadows would
play, a texture on which variation would play.

Bacon is thus an exception who proves the point in a very individual way. But against the
general tendency to ‘completeness’, there are other artists, with something in common relevant
to the Asian way of painting, for whom
space, ‘emptiness’ or a sense of
incompleteness in a work were not a sign of
failure, but a means of expression. Consider
Kline (see Buttress5, left), Gottlieb, Hartung
(see Composition P, 1960/259 in pastel and
wax, below), Twombly, Motherwell,
Liechtenstein and the later de Kooning,
whose works occupy, rather than cover
space. There is one important factor that
connects them: an interest in, love of and
openness towards the influence of Asian art
and Asian thinking, especially Zen
Buddhism.

Zen and the concept of the Way form part of a

range Asian philosophies that developed in
parallel and reflect Asia’s essential perception
of the world as a unity best apprehended as a
whole. Western analytical thinking, and the
search for those distinctions that helped the
Western mind develop its own way of
understanding play a much-restricted role in
Asian visual arts. In the Japanese and Chinese
traditions especially, what is not shown and
will be understood by the educated man, can be
as important as what is, as we saw from the
earlier example of Sengai.

In Chinese art, this was especially been true of works from the Northern Song, which embrace
and accept emptiness and space – and see them as integral to the means of expression of a
painting. With the spread of Buddhism, finding the Way became an exercise in exploring the
unfinished, the might-be and might-have-been. In exploring the Zen Buddhist path, the absent is
as important to our understanding as the present, the ‘is’ is complemented by the ‘not-is’.

As the philosopher-writer Iris Murdoch asserted of our reality, from a Western perspective:6

Reality is not a given whole. An understanding of this, a respect for the contingent, is
essential for imagination as opposed to fantasy. …

4 Francis Bacon - The Logic of Sensation (1981) Translated by Daniel W. Smith, University of Minnesota Press (2005);
5 MOCA says of this work: The three black lines cut off at the painting’s edges stir an image of Kline’s sweeping arm movements,
and splatters of black paint connote high-velocity, energetic mark making. … while Buttress appears … produced spontaneously,
Kline worked from carefully composed preliminary sketches. Small-scale drawing remained at the core of his large-scale painting
6 Iris Murdoch, “Against Dryness”, Encounter, January 1961, pp.16-20, see http://www.unz.org/Pub/Encounter-1961jan

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 Real people are destructive of myth, contingency is destructive of fantasy and opens the
door to imagination … But since reality is incomplete, art must not be too much afraid
of incompleteness.

The corresponding idea of an ‘open’ artwork, specific but incomplete by virtue of the different
interpretations it may carry, therefore to be ‘completed’ by interaction with the viewer or
listener has been developed by Umberto Eco, in his influential book The Open Work:7

A work of art, therefore, is a complete and closed form in its uniqueness as a balanced
organic whole, while at the same time constituting an open product on account of its
susceptibility to countless different interpretations which do not impinge on its
unadulterable specificity. Hence, every reception of a work of art is both an
interpretation and a performance of it, because in every reception the work takes on a
fresh perspective for itself.

To demonstrate how long thinking on these lines has been developing, and also the limitations
inherent in the traditional way of discussing multiple perspectives, Eco next invokes Dante:

… in this type of [traditional] operation, "openness" is far removed from meaning

"indefiniteness" of communication, "infinite" possibilities of form, and complete …
freedom of reception. What in fact is made available is a range of … interpretative
solutions, and these never allow the reader to move outside the strict control of the
author. Dante sums up the issue in his thirteenth Letter:

We shall consider the following lines in order to make this type of treatment
clearer: In exitu Israel de Egypto, domus Jacob de populo barbaro, facta est
Judea sanctificatio eius, Israel potestas eius. Now if we just consider the literal
meaning, what is meant here is the departure of the children of Israel from
Egypt at the time of Moses. If we consider the allegory, what is meant is our
human redemption through Christ. If we consider the moral sense, what is
meant is the conversion of the soul from the torment and agony of sin to a state
of grace. Finally, if we consider the anagogical sense, what is meant is the
release of the spirit from the bondage of this corruption to the freedom of
eternal glory.

Eco moves on to discuss a more modern perspective on the balance between that which is
chosen by the artist and presented in the work, and that which is left to be implied, declaring:

Every work of art… is effectively open to a virtually unlimited range of possible

readings, each of which causes the work to acquire new vitality in terms of one
particular taste, or perspective.... Contemporary aesthetics has frequently pointed out
this last characteristic of every work of art. According to Luigi Pareyson:

The work of art ... is a form … that has been concluded; or we can see it as an
infinite contained within finiteness … The work therefore has infinite aspects,
which are not just "parts" or fragments of it, because each of them contains the
totality of the work, and reveals it according to a given perspective.

Total absence can break the link to the real, and be a spur to the imagination too. As Stephane
Symons notes in discussing Hiroshima’s ‘orphan shadows’ (e.g. Shadow of a woman with a
cane, below) and their connection with the form of Hiroshige’s prints:8

7 1989; Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, Trans Anna Cancogni, Chapter 1, p.3, ff.
8 Stéphane Symons, In Praise of Shadows: Commemorative Images and the Atomic Bomb, Image & Narrative, Vol.14 No.1
(2013); Symons attributes the idea of ‘orphan shadows’ to Dennis Hollier. The title references Junichiro Tanizaki’s famous study of
Japanese aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows
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 … this mental space in which objects have lost
their shadow and seemingly exist without it (the
“floating” world) is constructed in order to
sharpen one’s gaze to experiences in real life
where shadows … seem to detach themselves
from their referents and, in this very “orphan”
state, act upon them. This complementary relation
between shadows-released from-their-referents
and referents-released-from-their-shadows allows
for experiences where the borders between what is
real and what is non-real become slightly blurred
…

These dichotomies: absence-presence, unity-emptiness, universality-specificity, are found in the

work of Wai Pongyu, a young Hong Kong artist, whose work – though impossible to
pigeonhole - is cast firmly in the Asian tradition in its fundamental assumption that the subject
of art is the universe, and that to represent any part of it can only be an effort to communicate
understanding, not an attempt
to depict a specific reality. Or,
if a specific set of realities
may be cast together into one
‘moment’, then such a casting
together cannot be done in a
way that implies away the
rest. As in Zen, emptiness and
completeness coexist. The
appearance of incompleteness
is only a vehicle for opening
the doors of the imagination
to the fullness of the universe.

From the vast number of

possible choices available to
this artist in selecting objects,
names, ideas, concepts to
aggregate within his
“Moment of Truth” works
(see detail from Moment of
truth No. 27, left), Wai selects
those that speak to him.

The viewer then attempts – is

tempted - to explore the
universe and the relationships
amongst its infinite
components, as the art work
suggests it to him. Sometimes
the journey may be physical, sometimes metaphysical; at other times human or social, political
or religious, aesthetic or conceptual.

The ‘empty’ spaces in the works will, one hopes, be filled by the viewer’s imagination, liberated
by the artist. Apt is Paul Klee’s remark, noted by Lyotard in “Sublime et avant garde”, that art

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does not imitate nature but it creates an inter-world. In relation to this ‘Zwischenwelt’, says
Deleuze, referenced in Bogue’s book “Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts”9:

Klee speaks of his desire to create an “interworld” midway between an objective

exterior domain and a subjective, internal imaginary realm, a natural world but one that
in ordinary experience is not seen – an invisible nature in potentia, a possible world
made visible through art. Klee’s interworld is the world of art as natura naturans, as
force and energy in the process of constructing its own cosmos.

Thus Wai would read in the words of Leopardi10 in Wild Broom a reminder that the dark sky
against which the stars wheel like pin-pricks as well as the mist-like knots of stars, which seem
emptinesses or incomplete, are in fact vastly greater parts of our universe, against which we are
nothing:

… e tutto di scintille in giro … the universe glittering with sparks

Per lo vòto Seren brillar il mondo.
E poi che gli occhi a quelle luci appunto,
Ch'a lor sembrano un punto,
E sono immense, in guisa
Che un punto a petto a lor son terra e mare
Veracemente; a cui
L'uomo non pur, ma questo
Globo ove l'uomo è nulla,
Sconosciuto è del tutto; e quando miro
Quegli ancor più senz'alcun fin remoti
Nodi quasi di stelle,
Ch'a noi paion qual nebbia, a cui non l'uomo
E non la terra sol, ma tutte in uno,
Del numero infinite e della mole,
Con l'aureo sole insiem, le nostre stelle
O sono ignote, o così paion come
Essi alla terra, un punto
Di luce nebulosa …
that wheel through the tranquil void.
And then I fix my eyes on those lights
that seem pin-pricks,
yet are so vast in form
that earth and sea are really a pin-prick
to them: to whom man,
and this globe where man is nothing,
are completely unknown: and gazing
at those still more infinitely remote,
knots, almost, of stars,
that seem like mist to us, to which
not only man and earth but all
our stars, infinite in number and mass,
with the golden sun,
are unknown, or seem like points
of misted light, as they appear
from earth …

For, as Leopardi makes clear through the transparency of poetry, with the indifference to
incompleteness called for by Iris Murdoch, all efforts to present the whole, the complete picture
must fail. How could one convey infinity with completeness in the scope of a single work of
art? By including the whole of creation? The idea itself is absurd; and so the folly of the view
that completeness is necessary - even desirable, let alone possible leaps out at us, be we viewer
or critic, artist or connoisseur.

This attachment to the aesthetic value of the absent, and the rejection of the formulaic and
predictable is found not only in the aesthetic-philosophical standpoint of Murdoch, and of Zen
but also of critic and aesthetician Slavoj Zizek as commented on by Matthew Flisfeder:11

According to Zizek, art and science engage with sublimation each in their own way. …
Art … remains attached to lived reality. It takes from it a fragment elevating it to the
level of Thing (the Lacanian definition of sublimation). Art, however, directly evokes
the Thing. Sublimation remains incomplete. Because the artist clings to a piece of
experiential reality, the incompleteness of sublimation allows him or her to create the
effect of the sublime … What is beautiful in art is precisely its ability to manifest that
which effectively resists the formulaic in knowledge.

9 Quoted in ‘Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts’, Ed. Ronald Bogue, p.114, Routledge, 2003
10 Giacomo Leopardi, Canti, XXXIV, La Ginestra, O Fiore Del Deserto - Wild Broom, extract, trans. AS Kline,
http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Italian/Leopardi.htm#anchor_Toc38684164 , last accessed 28th July, 2016
11 M. Flisfeder The Symbolic, the Sublime, and Slavoj Zizek's Theory of Film

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As Zizek himself put it in his discussion on film of creativity in cinema:12

That’s the ontological view of reality that we get here, as if it’s an unfinished universe.
This is, I think, a very modern feeling. It is through such ontology of unfinished reality
that cinema became a truly modern art.

Unless the artist deliberately chooses to limit his vision, as David did in the Coronation of
Napoleon and Josephine, it is precisely what is not there, but nonetheless visible to our minds,
to our inner vision, that defines the quality of the work of art.

Of course, that quality is not magic’d into being just because an artist presents a work that may
appear incomplete. But the enigma of Leonardo’s La Gioconda or St. John the Baptist does not
derive from its illustrative completeness; nor is it lost because the modern viewer doesn’t
understand the symbolism, any more than the communicativeness of Gu Xi’s ‘Old Trees’
(below) is negated by the fact that large parts of the silk are given over to the appearance of
emptiness, of evanescent mists and cloud. In each case the absence is the essence.

So incompleteness turns out to be a key element of artistic expression: in contemporary cinema,

in Song painting, in 19th century Italian poetry, in Japanese aesthetics as it is in the work of our
but-briefly mentioned contemporary Hong Kong artist, Wai Pongyu – key to the linking of the
wider universe to the image conjured up by the artist in the mind of the viewer.

12 Slavoj Zizek – The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema – Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Film – Full transcript last accessed at

https://beanhu.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/the-perverts-guide-to-cinema/ on 28 July, 2016

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Looking at and into Wai’s recent works (e.g. Moment of Truth No.33, above) could lead some to
assert some works might be considered ‘incomplete’. To which one might ask whether and why
that matters. Or reflect why the artist has chosen not to cover the paper with his lines (as he used
to do), and to be sparing in his use of colour. Or note the integration of a myriad otherwise
disconnected things – all of them part of the universe; all of them representative of the things,
the ideas, the emotions of our part of the universe but with no presumption that we are all or
everything in it. In short to see in the spaces, the absences defined by light and dark, Leopardi’s

… universe glittering with sparks

that wheel through the tranquil void.

From this perspective, ‘Incompleteness’ is a call, inviting the viewer to match his imagination
with that of the artist. From another, it attracts artists with complementary perspectives on the
idea of completeness and its attainability.

One response to that call came from Wai’s

fellow Chinese University graduate and
artist, Hung Fai. These two artists have
embarked upon a series of collaborative
works that have sought complementarity
between their two different styles in ink
and line and to ‘fill in the gaps’ between
their different ways of thinking, seeing
and expressing themselves through ink art.
It is a collaboration that has proved highly
catalytic for both as they have explored
each other’s way of working.

Viewers familiar with each artist’s style

will know and new viewers will observe
that one artist (Hung Fai) often applies a
direct, strictly linear style of making his
marks on paper: intense, even rigid,
emphasising order and the plane. The only
breaches of this ‘protocol of order’ are the
irregular dotted emphases with which he
punctuates his lines, and the effect of
water on the transmission of his lines and
dots, as it catches the ink and wafts it with unpredictable variation of intensity across and
through the paper, as we see in the detail above (Same Line twice, No.4, 2016, detail).13

The other artist (Wai Pongyu), draws in a curvilinear freehand that refuses to be constrained and
may even float across the pre-existing direction of the work-in-progress, rendering its
orientation uncertain, and causing Hung Fai (in his responses) to strive to re-establish a new
sense of order, different to but consistent with the old, each artist in turn responding as a new
pattern in the work emerges from the decisions of the other. In addition (relevant as will be seen
shortly) Hung Fai’s lines are strongly impressed upon the paper and highly concentrated, while
Wai Pongyu’s are more gently laid upon it and we find regions of concentration only where his
curves compress up against each other, adding to the density of ink in those areas.

While Hung’s and Wai’s linear styles differ, they conjoin in adopting Hung Fai’s signature
‘Layered’ approach to creating ink images that progressively transform as the ink settles down
through layers of paper, allowing the viewer to see a work ‘uncompleting’ itself as the intensity
of the ink diminishes with each layer it traverses. The ink is not only drawn osmotically by the
water across the paper, but also down through the paper layers, diluting as it goes. Hung Fai has

13 see http://waipongyu.com/?portfolio=same-line-twice-4 for an online image of the complete work

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previously used this to explore repeating patterns with different ink densities, which can create
rhythms across several sheets mounted and framed to be viewed adjacently. For him (when used
in works uniquely his own), it also displays the futility of the ancient tradition of copying the
masters, and of expecting the process to lead anywhere new.

However, in these collaborative works, the auto-copying that takes place by osmosis does lead
to something new, with the impact enhanced by the different effect it has on the work of the two
artists in combination. The works are not only a highly unusual example of success in
collaborative painting14 in their own right, but also throw an interesting light on the process of
‘unmaking’ or ‘uncompleting’ a work. The osmotic process – a process so essential to ink art –
transforms the ink put on paper according to the different styles and approaches of these artists.

The most obvious impact of the osmotic process is dilution – the image, initially firm and clear,
becomes less defined and paler as the ink dilutes. To compare the process with our earlier
example of Rauschenberg erasing the de Kooning drawing to achieve completion of the work (a
recognised Western collaborative success), we can point out that Chinese paper achieves the
same for Wai and Hung jointly, with the process of completion as the ink spreads, taking away
from rather than adding to the first-created layer of the work(s).

As we can see (left to right above), when these two artists apply ink to the first layer and it
bleeds through to the lower layers of paper, the appearance of their respective contributions
takes on a new character with each stage. It becomes more ephemeral, in a simultaneous process
of realization and erasure, through the three layers, to produce three separate expressions of
what is, in terms of painterly action, one single work. Call these State 1, State 2 and State 3.
Furthermore, the visual relationship between different parts of each State likewise changes:
Wai’s initially darker waves fade to a lesser intensity than Hung’s more persistent pointillage.

One might think to compare the way a print is worked through its different states by a
printmaker. But while a print loses its edge, works in ink as created as Hung and Wai simply
transform themselves and lose intensity as they ‘uncomplete’ towards their fully evolved state.
Time’s arrow reverses with this ink painting. Instead of thicker layers (as when painting in oils,
say) as completeness approaches, we end up with thinner pigmentation of ink within the paper.
As a landscape might slowly transform and features erode as the nature of the rock allows (e.g.
limestone vs. granite), so - but in minutes or even seconds - these works too transform.

A parallel with nature and landscape seems appropriate. The landscape-tinged feeling of the
work(s) illustrated is undeniable, though they have been created in a purely abstract manner,
with each artist drawing or painting on a portion of the paper, generating the response of his
partner to continue the work, alternating in their use of space, occasionally interpenetrating the

14 Collaborative works are rare, in the Western visual arts outside of works by couples such as Gilbert & George, the Chapman

Brothers or Christo and Jeanne-Claude, or irregular efforts as those by Basquiat and Warhol jointly, or unfamiliar pairings as in
Rubens and Breughel’s, ‘The Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man,’ (1615); and fairly rare too in Asian visual arts, though familiar
in the form of colophons added to works as by painter Shen Zhou's close friend, the noted literatus Wu Kuan (1436-1504), or in
occasional collaborations such that of Yoshitomo Nara (奈良美智), and his pupil Hiroshi Sugito(杉戶洋), or of Zhang Daqian
(張大千, 1899-1983) with Pu Xinyu (溥心畬) who in their collaborative works of the 1930s were referred to as the “South Zhang
and North Pu”; or more contemporaneously New York-based literati-style painter Arnold Chang and photographer Michael
Cherney; or, in photography/performance art, RongRong & inri .

p.10
other’s territory, perhaps even transforming the essential implied perspective or directionality of
the entire work, until each of them, and the two together, are satisfied the work is complete.

The artists’ different working principles most directly affect the appearance of the top layer –
the ‘original’, so to speak – but also indirectly the other layers, which are no less ‘complete’
works, both despite and because of the variable elements - dampness of the paper, intensity of
the ink or of the pressure exerted by the artist on the paper - that affect how the paper carries the
water and with it the ink across and through the medium and thus influence the end result.

All in all, State 1, the top

layer reflects the actual
visual balance the artists
struck as they drew: the
character of the lines is
clearly visible, with Hung’s
firm, ordered lines setting a
receding plane, while Wai’s
lines undulate to create
wave-like patterns. A
meandering channel appears
between their two
territories, somewhat
reminiscent of a Chinese
river landscape; while water
spreads the ink of their lines
to form fogs and clouds
across the surface of the paper. The implied horizon that traverses horizontally at three-fifths
height appears to define a land-air boundary; though in fact the artists have not pre-determined
any ‘up’ or ‘down’, or verticality or ‘subject-matter’; indeed they often work at the same table
sitting at 90° to each other, without re-orienting the paper as they paint.

Still, in the next layer, State 2,

Wai’s dark but less intense
lines turn gradually lighter
though an undulating
impression persists; while
Hung’s more intensely created
thin lines lighten more slowly,
so that his irregular dotting
now tends to dominate, to
emphasize the fractured nature
of the links between the dots,
like a rainstorm breaking up
the surface of the ocean, and
these effects transform the
visual relationship between the
elements of the work.
Everything seems unmoored.
What felt like land now more nearly resembles a seascape. What might have been a rock or an
outcrop layered with trees or vegetation could be a vessel or an island, clouds might be spume;
the elements intermingle; mysterious rays appear through the clouds.

And as the inky precision of the top layer fades away, dark brooding dramas mutate into
mysterious impending apocalypse, the uncertainty growing as we cannot tell whether we are
seeing land or sea or sky, in a Turneresque fusion of light and water, air and cloud, waves and
glimmering intimations of disaster (bringing to mind Durer’s watercolour Landscape Study of
1525), mixed with a sentiment of transcendence and impermanence.

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In State 3, the third and
ultimate evolution of this
particular Wai/Hung work,
arrived at as the shadows of
its origins – the particles of
ink carried into the weave of
the paper - move through the
medium that helps create it,
we find that the loss of
particularity, and the
dissolution of boundaries has
brought new sensations and
new feelings that even the
artists could not expect when
they set out on the voyage.

If we compare the sense of

barely tamed, latent
uncontrollability in ‘State 3’ with works such as Turner’s Seascape with distant Coast15, we can
immediately sense their affinity in the refusal (in the case of Turner) and the choice not (in the
case of Wai/Hung) to be pinned down by an excess of definition. This enables them to evoke
one essential quality of the natural – its untameable, uncontrollable aspect, the sense of latent
power - precisely by abstaining from trying to paint a ‘thing’. The Chinese artists do this by
simply allowing natural processes to take their course – initiated and guided by them, true, but
they neither control nor predetermine the outcome. In this way small, monochrome works can
successfully evoke “the Sublime”, what Tate curator Christine Riding calls “the immensity or
turbulence of Nature”16.

Turner, by contrast did

not reject man’s artifice,
He simply denied that the
use of this or that
pigment, or this or that
form, must follow the
established norms of
painting, especially the
need to represent the
existence of a tangible
subject-matter – that men
of his time considered
reasonable and normal.

His late works were

replete with forms that
might be waves or land,
or sea or sky, occasionally anchored - as in Seascape with distant Coast - by a barely
discernable object (castle, port, rocks, house?) but often with no clear up or down. Appreciation
of these magical works suffered at the time from Turner’s rejection of norms. As Tate Britain’s
commentary on the late and unfinished paintings reminds us:17

“The account published in the Athenaeum, one of the most influential art journals of the
time, declared that these later paintings were the ‘eccentricities of a great genius in
which he of late years indulged, and which rendered it necessary that he should attach

15 J.M.W. Turner, 1775-1851 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-seascape-with-distant-coast-n05516 c. 1840, 36” x 48”

16 http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/display/art-and-sublime, while discussing the works of John Martin (1789-1854)
17 http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/unfinished-repulsive-or-work-prophet

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 rings to his pictures (contrary to Academical requirements) in order to show which side
of the picture should be hung uppermost, – those were his dotages and lees, and will in
all probability sink in reputation and in price’. The same negative reaction was directed
at Turner’s unfinished work”.

This reference to it being necessary that Turner ‘should attach rings to his pictures … in order to
show which side of the picture should be hung uppermost’ reads delightfully in the context of
Hung and Wai’s working methods, which likewise do not presuppose an ‘up’ or a ‘down’.

It follows that when the viewer sees a landscape in the Wai/Hung painting, he may be making a
false attribution due to an accidental resemblance. What do we actually observe? We observe
ink displaying different patterns and densities. Also that these patterns and densities change in
different ways, in the different States, through the natural processes by which the work came
into being. Thus our reification of the work – seeing in it a physical reality - may be appropriate
after all. Ink particles are carried by water through a medium (paper) by virtue of physical
processes of attraction and relative pressure, as mists and spume are created and carried through
the air, or eddies and waves propagate through water; or (on a different timescale) as rocks on
land differentially erode and end up in streams or in the sea through the action of rain. One
might see the artists’ paper as a microcosm of the earth.

That is the physical world. Given that imagination is permitted in art, possibly encouraged,
within limits, one should not shy away from linkages that may at first glance seem only remote,
but which may prove revealing, when parallels and consequences are explored. One should
embrace Eco’s comment in The Open Work18, previously quoted, that “Contemporary aesthetics
has frequently pointed out this last characteristic of every work of art [new vitality in terms of
one particular taste, or perspective]. According to Luigi Pareyson:

The work of art ... therefore has infinite aspects, which are not just "parts" or fragments
of it, because each of them contains the totality of the work, and reveals it according to
a given perspective.”

Consider, for example, the clear space meandering between the firmly drawn lines of Hung and
the wave-like ink patterns laid down by Wai. If we reify this part of the work, one with an
abstract cause - the mutual respect and distance the artists allowed to come into existence
between the painted expression of their two styles on paper - one could see this space as a path
(we earlier suggested it could be read as a river). But what kind of path? Signifying what?

This brings us full circle to the theme of completeness, and how artist and viewer are complicit
in a search for meaning19, achieved by the effective pooling of their experiences, knowledge,
sensitivities and perceptions, through the medium of the work, to arrive at a transmitted
understanding that may be quite far from the intentions of the artist.

Indeed, in some respects, the more a work can carry the imagination of the viewer beyond the
scope of the artist’s conscious intention, the more it may be said to possess that quality admired
by Paul Klee: “The power of creativity cannot be named. It remains mysterious to the end.”20

In looking at the State 3 component of the painting, one might have come into one’s mind the
image of a path that Rilke drew – but in our mind’s eye not on canvas - when he wrote, and we
now read the poem Orpheus, Euridike, Hermes,21 in which ‘one pale path unrolled like a strip of
cotton’:

18 1989; Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, Trans Anna Cancogni, Chapter 1, p.3, ff.
19 cf. Ezster Gafalvi’s review of Ozon’s film Dans la Maison ‘By applying our individual codes to our perception of a piece, we
invariably play a part in “creating” the work; by being a part of a transaction, we are complicit in its creation.’
http://www.dantemag.com/2013/06/the-symbiosis-of-artist-and-viewer/
20 Notebooks, 1921, Trans., Spiller (ed), Wittenborn (NY), Humphries (London)
21 Rainer Maria Rilke, 1904, in the translation by Stephen Mitchell ISBN-13: 9780679722014 Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

: http://stephenmitchellbooks.com/translations-adaptations/the-selected-poetry-of-rainer-maria-rilke/
p.13
 Felsen waren da
und wesenlose Wälder. Brücken über Leeres
und jener große graue blinde Teich,
der über seinem fernen Grunde hing
wie Regenhimmel über einer Landschaft.
Und zwischen Wiesen, sanft und voller Langmut,
erschien des einen Weges blasser Streifen,
There were cliffs there,
and forests made of mist. There were bridges
spanning the void, and that great gray blind lake
which hung above its distant bottom
like the sky on a rainy day above a landscape.
And through the gentle, unresisting meadows
one pale path unrolled like a strip of cotton.

Conventionally, painters express this story in a dark and sombre mise-en-scene. This reflects its
location (Hades) and the events involved occasion (the loss by Orpheus of Euryidice back into
the Underworld). But in Rilke, we read and sense through words such as ‘forests made of mist’,
‘void’, ‘gray blind lake’, rainy’, ‘gentle’, ‘pale’, ‘cotton’ a different perspective, in words that
perfectly fit the emotion of the Wai/Hung work. And there is much else in Rilke’s rendering of
the events to demand a very different focus from the traditional and call up a correspondingly
different mental and visual tonality in response, one which emphasises the washing away of
Eurydice’s presence into death.

They had to be behind him, but their steps

were ominously soft. If only he could
turn around, just once (but looking back
would ruin this entire work, so near
completion), then he could not fail to see them,
those other two, who followed him so softly:

The god of speed and distant messages,

a traveler’s hood above his shining eyes,
his slender staff held out in front of him,
and little wings fluttering at his ankles;
and on his left arm, barely touching it: she.
….
…. And her hands
had grown so unused to marriage that the god’s
infinitely gentle touch of guidance
hurt her, like an undesired kiss.
…
She was already loosened like long hair,
poured out like fallen rain,
shared like a limitless supply.
….
And when, abruptly,
the god put out his hand to stop her, saying,
with sorrow in his voice: He has turned around -,
she could not understand, and softly answered

Who?
Far away,
dark before the shining exit-gates,
someone or other stood, whose features were
unrecognizable. He stood and saw
how, on the strip of road among the meadows,
with a mournful look, the god of messages
silently turned to follow the small figure
already walking back along the path,
her steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.

Feel these words: ‘ominously soft’, ‘barely touching’, ‘infinitely gentle’, ‘with sorrow in his
voice’, ‘softly answered’, ‘silently turned’, ‘someone or other stood ‘, ‘uncertain, gentle, and
without impatience’. Only the image of ‘shining exit-gates’ offers energy, a sense of precision.

What is evident is the delicacy, the gentleness, with which Rilke suffuses this poem. The
mysterious separation between the living and the dead, bridged only by Hermes, but which
p.14
cannot be disguised; and also the sense of misty lightness in the choice of words that renders the
idea of Hades in a very unconventionally. It is the uncertainty, the absence of any sense of space
and time that seems to envelop Eurydice, as she loses contact with the real world of men, and
the shades surround her as she returns to them. But these shades despite being described in the
opening of the poem as ‘veins of silver ore’ in the ‘deep uncanny mine of souls’ do not seem
oppressive. For in this vision, the substance of the living simply disappears. This is the origin of
the sense of disturbance we experience. Starting from the clarity of each artist’s vision, and the
comfort we can derive from their broadly ordered patterns of painting, we have rapidly found
ourselves in a world in which we cannot be certain of anything; of up and down, of substance
and vapour, of presence or absence. Uncertainty reigns in this pale Hades.

One might now draw the parallel out to examine the processes employed by Hung and Wai. As
the water passes through the paper layers, its charge of ink is gradually diminished. Its ability to
express the real is turned into an expression of shadows of the real. Our sight of the original
expression of these two artists is turned into a form of memory of what they created in State 1 of
this work. As with human memory, it fades, and by State 3 becomes fumes and mist.

If one wished to carry further the allegorical process that Eco allows, even requires, we would
note again his observations in The Open Work:22

A work of art ... is a complete and closed form in its uniqueness as a balanced organic
whole, while … constituting an open product on account of its susceptibility to countless
different interpretations which do not impinge on its unadulterable specificity. Hence,
every reception of a work of art is both an interpretation and a performance of it, because
in every reception the work takes on a fresh perspective for itself.

We could then postulate that State 1 of the Wai/Hung collaborative work represents the world of
men and things, of Orpheus, undiluted, present directly to the eye, as the artists saw it while
they painted. State 2, is a world between worlds, a Zwischenwelt, representing Hermes, who
moves between the real world and the underworld; it is more ambiguous, less shadowy, though
the outlines of the original world remain reasonably clear, even if their precise nature has been
rendered ambiguous. And finally State 3, the third of these transformations in ink, represents
Eurydice: still identifiable, but a shade, living in the shadows of the real, with memories
gradually fading as her new world becomes her only one. Is this also an allegory of aging?

Other collaborative works may be structured differently and produce different associations, but
the power of this method, and of this collaboration, is in the richness of its evocations.

We recall again Deleuze:23

Klee speaks of his desire to create an “interworld” midway between an objective

exterior domain and a subjective, internal imaginary realm, a natural world but one that
in ordinary experience is not seen – an invisible nature in potentia, a possible world
made visible through art. Klee’s interworld is the world of art as natura naturans, as
force and energy in the process of constructing its own cosmos.

The process by which these two artists collaborate, produces works in which ‘Completion’
means the gradual disappearance of the physical signs of their artistic expression. As they
‘construct their own cosmos’, it leads to a realm similar to that admired by Paul Klee, partway
between the ‘objective exterior domain and a … possible world made visible through art’.

Such is the power of Incompleteness.

Hong Kong, November 2016

22 ibid: 1989; Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, Trans Anna Cancogni, Chapter 1, p.3, ff.
23 Ibid - ‘Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts’, Ed. Ronald Bogue, p.114, Routledge, 2003
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