Connecting

Over time, place, or culture

Dear reader,

Here is an image featuring three rabbits. It’s a lovely picture; the rabbits look cute and soft and cuddly and adorable.

This piece of art was made during the Qing Dynasty. This meant that it was done sometime from the 1600s or the following 300 years.

In other words, some ancient Chinese artist skillfully rendered these three rabbits in such a way that a woman of Anglo-Celtic descent in Melbourne in the 2020s looked at them and gushed “Awwww…”

I think that’s great.

I went to Hong Kong some years ago and in one of the art galleries I visited I saw a ceramic dog that had been sculpted during the Tang Dynasty (618-907AD). Although it wasn’t hyper-realistic, this figurine conveyed a strong sense of dogginess – the bright enthusiastic popping eyes, the flapping tongue, a body taut with happy energy - I could imagine it vibrating with eagerness.

Its sculptor could not have conceived of someone who looked like me or the country in which I live and certainly could not have imagined the modern technologies that define the life I live. I could not be more foreign to that Tang Dynasty sculptor – or they to me – and yet, when they came to represent a dog, they molded into their materials the same characteristics – and the same pleasure in those characteristics – that inexorably says ‘dog’ to someone like me.

I couldn’t find a picture of that Tang Dynasty dog online but I couldn’t go past this Han Dynasty dog. Photograph by Gary Todd, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

I love these moments when you look at something made by an artist who is separated from you by era or geography or culture and that something still connects you to that artist and what they thought or the way they felt about their subject.

Of course, it’s also wonderful when you look at a work of art and are electrified by the differences that are the consequence of those removes of history or culture, when you brush up against the limits of your own worldview (and its biases) and, correspondingly, feel that worldview shift a bit. But that’s a story for another post.

This post is to celebrate those moments of connection that reach past our normal conception of ‘foreign’ or ‘different’ and connect the inspiration and artistic skill of an artist and the creative interpretation of a viewer.

Creative prompt

Today, I want you to leave a comment and tell me about a time when you experienced that sense of connection.

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