Exhibiting in Beijing
This work, based on the I Ching or Book of Changes, will be exhibited at the 5th Creative Machines Show at the Taikang Art Museum, Beijing, from 16/11/2024 to 20/02/2025.
Fu Hsi was the legendary discoverer of the Yang (whole) and Yin (broken) lines that compose the eight Trigrams of the ‘I Ching’ or ‘Book of Changes’. It is one of the world’s oldest books and its traditional roots date back almost 4 millennia. In his ‘Science and Civilisation in China’, Joseph Needham described it as the principal canonical text of Chinese history, science and culture. In his studies and writings, the artist has explored the book and believes it is an ancient generative system – a symbolic cosmology. The book composes an emergent process that uses permutations of the two basic principles –Yin and Yang – to build a system that describes the universe, its evolution and destiny. It can also be interrogated as an oracle – divining the current time of the consultation within the continuum of past-present-future which it encompasses. This permutative structure has been a continuing influence on the artist’s practice and informs much of his output since the late 1960s when he first encountered the book. In this drawing, which is dedicated to Fu Hsi, three bands are drawn one on top of the other and then permutated to create a total of 36 unique open knots that compose the full set of possibilities so that it becomes a complete formal grammar.
