Grab the bull by the ring in its nose

When the artist who calls himself Abugy (阿卜極) completed the painting for which this exhibition is named, he called over his toddler son and asked him what he saw. Objectively, the canvas is a long rectangular black plane with two interlocking gold circles in the center. But his kid, as Abugy recounts the story, looked at it for no more than a second and said simply that the painting depicted a bull with a ring through its nose. Abugy says he practically fell over when he heard this.

It was one of those moments when children shock adults with their immediate and spot-on insight, because the ring in a bull's nose is an image used in the practice of Zen meditation, of which Abugy is a devoted student. His paintings are a reflection of his ongoing inner search, and the fact that his son happened coincidentally upon a Zen image reinforced his belief that enlightenment entails achieving the totally free consciousness of a child. Along with meditation and studying, painting is one way in which he aims to get to that point.

Ring on the Bull's Nose features over 20 oil paintings, almost all of then completed this year and which earned Abugy -- whose name is a Mandarin phoneticization of a Japanese term for fat boy -- the Liao Chi-chun Oil Painting Award for outstanding young artists (Abugy is 39).

It's difficult to discern if the paintings are tools for meditation or the results of it. No matter which they are, the meditative aspect in each image comes though in the blur of colors that Abugy says tries to break down the time-space continuum. And there is unquestionably a force in many of the canvases that draws the viewer in so that several minutes could slip by in what seems like a mere second.

Viewing the paintings, according to Abugy, should be an experience similar to his own in making them -- they need a clear and peaceful mind. For him, working in this way has become a lifestyle, which he describes as pure and simple and basically the antithesis of the hip, urban artist, whom he views with thinly veiled scorn. Too many people involved in art, he said, are seeking some form of self-aggrandizement, or at the very least, desire the public's applause. One could say that he's more interested in the sound of one hand clapping and the impenetrable logic puzzles that his images raise.

Abugy is hardly the first to use oil on canvas for conceptual pieces that delve explicitly into Buddhist philosophies, but his use of color and form achieves a rare kind of grace that begs for a longer look, even though he says they don't require any more time than a split second.