Perception — Being — Flow: An Ink‑and‑Water Meditation

“Perception — Being — Flow” heralds the overture of my artistic practice. In the realm of ink painting, I often sense myself situated in a field where human and environment are co‑active: the environment acquires meaning through human gaze, while the artist draws vitality from the environment; the two seem to immerse in dialogue with one another. For me, creation is a quest for being and, even more, a recalibration of perception — an act of letting the body submerge into “flow.” As Deleuze states, art does not reproduce; rather it captures forces and fleeting sensory experience (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991). When water and ink meander across paper, I perceive something that surpasses material appearance: in that instant water and ink transcend the status of mere media and reach a higher plane of being.

Water penetrates the fibers, ink diffuses, leaving its own trajectory on paper — I intentionally reserve ample space for ink and water to “self‑generate.” Such tension resembles a negotiation: my intention is only half of the picture; the other half depends on the “agency” and “vitality” inherent in matter. The American philosopher Jane Bennett emphasizes that matter is not inert but brimming with life and efficacy (Bennett, 2010). So it is in my practice: water and ink condense into form on the surface as if endowed with their own will. Their sedimentation, flow paths, and evaporation transmit information like a whispered narrative of past and present. Works such as Memory and Whispering Riverbed arise from this collaboration: I pour water and splash ink; water draws its own lines, ink reveals its forms. The creative act becomes a conversation in which the material response shapes the final image. Throughout this generative process, I am like a vessel holding transformation, witnessing a segment of water’s statement gradually emerge over time. In the alternation of wet and dry, time is stretched; the evaporation of water and the capillary migration of ink become part of the work’s formation — creation is no longer an instant event but a slow brewing with matter in motion. All the while I attune to atmospheric and tactile cues: ambient humidity dictates the halo of ink diffusion; the temperature felt on my fingertips reflects where moisture lingers or retreats. Breath, temperature, gravity — these invisible nonhuman factors jointly cast the work into existence. I step aside, quietly keeping vigil, containing all that occurs like a vessel. In such moments, the boundary between subject and object dissolves; ink, water, and I enter the same plane of being.

Merleau‑Ponty holds that the body is the foundation of human existence, a site where subject and object interpenetrate (Merleau‑Ponty, 1945). I could not agree more. As I bend over the paper, watching ink travel with water, hearing the pulse of flowing traces, and feeling the studio’s shifting humidity on my skin, perception is no longer passive reception of information but an active process of generation — the senses and the world co‑constitute one another in their exchange.

The philosopher Gaston Bachelard notes that water, because of its protean flow, becomes a “material cause” in the human psyche, capable of stirring deep imaginative currents (Bachelard, 1942). Indeed, when working with ink and water I am often drawn into a near‑meditative sensory flow: sometimes the waterlines evoke the vagueness of memory; sometimes the pooling ink sinks like the hushed depth of a riverbed. Here, my perception continuously generates new meanings under the guidance of material. I believe such experience manifests the intuitive intelligence of the artistic body — full immersion slows subjective time, awareness seeming to dive into the material itself, entraining to its pulse. The body ceases to be mere executor; it becomes receptacle and site of perception. In these moments I incarnate a living medium, co‑participating in the work’s emergence.

As I touch the world, the world touches me — creator and material mutually shape and fulfill one another.

Every completed ink painting resembles an act of translation — transposing the language of matter and nature into codes of human perception. I see myself as a “translator,” trying to give water a legible form. As Karen Barad proposes with “intra‑action,” the agents within a phenomenon do not pre‑exist their interaction; they become entangled and co‑emerge through it (Barad, 2007). My role transforms constantly within this dynamic: at times listener, at times respondent, finally crystallizing those ineffable processes into a sensible image. Ink‑and‑water creation is thereby a “poem of being” jointly authored by myself and the medium. An artwork becomes a fluid language: behind its fixed surface pulses the exchange of people and things, multi‑sensory flows and mental currents at the moment of creation. In Whispering Riverbed, for example, I translated the sensation of pressing an ear to the riverbed and hearing the water murmur. Earlier in Listening to Water I depicted a figure communing with streams through hearing, gaining fresh insights and sensations. Such dialogues between human and nature forge new languages and connections. I know that in art we not only depict the world but also translate the relation between the world and ourselves: every water trace on the page is both the direct manifestation of natural force and the converted language of inner resonance. Art thus becomes an ontological act: through co‑creative engagement with matter, I transmute invisible perceptions and flowing experiences into tangible existence. Nature is no longer a passive object, nor is the human an isolated subject; within creation the two permeate each other, generating a new collective. When viewers stand before my work, seeing the intertwined ink‑and‑water traces, they may sense the flow state and cosmic attunement I once experienced. In that moment, artist, material, and observer form a new dialogic circuit: I serve as medium translating the language of matter into human experience; the viewer, through the work, encounters the vitality of nature and reflects on their own coexistence with all things. Art thus becomes a vessel of perception, a witness to being, a language in motion. It reminds me that humans are not mere onlookers of the world but always participants in the ongoing writing of existence alongside all beings.