Pigment paint & raised ‘Water Gild’ on wooden (Birch) support
60.0 x 40.0 (cm)
23.6 x 15.7 (inch)
The Hungarian-born archaeologist Aurel Stein visited the Margao Buddhist caves site at Dunhuang, Gansu Provence, China in 1907. This pilgrimage centre was an important site for the caravans of the silk Road, the last stop before entering the notorious Taklamakan Desert, the dunes had protected the painted fresco’s for more than a thousand years. In cave 17, the so-called library cave, Stein unearthed some 40,000 manuscripts (textual scrolls) including the earliest known printed document, the Diamond Sutra as well as the famous Dunhuang Star Atlas (DSA).
It is one of the most spectacular documents of the history of astronomy. It is a complete representation of the Chinese sky including numerous stars and asterisms depicted in a succession of maps covering the full sky …. it is the oldest star atlas known today from any civilization….(illustrating).. more than 1300 individual stars in the total sky ……as could be observed by eye from the Chinese imperial observatory….dated from the early Tang period (618-907)
Having spent much time in Dunhung and China over the last few year, this new work considers Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map as a celestial body. In previous works I had considered migration and trade routes within Fullers map. His non-hierarchical approach to geography aimed to minimise the distortions of conventional representations of the earth and their embedded cultural biases.
In this new work entitled ‘Dunhuang Star Atlas’ (DSA), I wish to grasp what lies beyond (outside or above) the map, entering space (and time) itself, represented as the void of a pictorial plain. In the painting, the constellation of Ursa Major (the Great She Bear), taken from the DSA, hovers above the north pole as clouds & mythical birds dance amid the continents. Clouds (the quintessential Chinese motif) originated in early cosmology. Cloud divination (reading) formed an essential part of Dynastic life. The emperor held the ‘mandate of heaven’ because he (his court astronomers) could divine the clouds and the heavens beyond. Temporal power was bestowed by heaven hence the constellations revolved around him (the Sun) who resides at the centre of all celestial charts.
Such cloud formations are illustrated within the DSA and have proved to be mathematically correct, as confirmed by the astronomer Jean-Marc Bonnet Bidaud (The International Dunhuang Project, British library in 2011). The DSA, recalls a time in history where mysticism of the ancients and empirical knowledge reside within a single moment. Empirical data would later come to dominate all forms of knowledge and the subtle reading of nature would disappear into the annals of history.
The layering of images in this works (map, clouds, mythical birds and star chart) alludes to a fundamental tenant of Chinese philosophy, that see’s man (the Emperor) at the centre of an ontological axis connecting heaven & earth. As described by the Perennial philosopher René Guénon in his book The Great Triad, perhaps echoing Fuller’s original maxim of the earth (Gia) floating within the cosmic void, where notions of time (and direction) ceases to exist.
As I write this I recall the words of my mum, who passed away a few months ago having battled cancer several years. At the end of her life she dismissed religious notions of heaven and hell instead looked to the stars and the ineffable splendour of what really lies within the night sky.
