Season Lao’s solo exhibition at CREATIVE MACAU manifests a silent dialogue between the artist and the natural world. In deference to the spirit of openness and indeterminacy that characterizes Lao’s work, the exhibition theme is deliberately left unnamed. As French philosopher Romaric Jannel observes:

“Season Lao’s work is born partly from chance (…). The artist does not control everything and the unpredictable ‘blank space’ (留白) plays an important role in the work. Thus, there is no fixed meaning in such a process, and the mind is left open to the ‘blank space’ (留白) or the ‘space of emergence’ (餘地) that arises through the encounter with the viewer and nature, reflecting the essence of co-emergence (緣起).”

“Unintentional chance is at the core of Season Lao’s work. He shares a commonality with John Cage in that unpredictable events give decisive meaning to his work (…). In other words, there also exists an accidental causal relationship. Lao’s encounters with the natural emptiness, that serve as the source of his work, is equivalent to asserting the dynamism of the microcosm, mesocosm, and macrocosm. In Lao’s work, capturing the relationships between all things in this way can be considered to be the driving force of ‘dependent origin co-arising’ (i.e. co-emergence) itself in all dimensions.”

Visitors are invited to step into this realm of quiet emergence and appreciate the profound “emptiness” that Season Lao’s work evokes.

Lei Sao Wu

Quoted from Romaric Jannel,

“A Dialogue Between Art and Philosophy with Season Lao’s Kyoshitsu Shohaku,”

EAA, The University of Tokyo.