There is a painting on my wall by Bullet Shih that upstages the others. Like a virtuosic actress, she takes the room as her stage and with marvelous variation, manifests her plastic and dynamic art. This is not a metaphor but a comparison. A painting is said to be “static”, unchanging; but this painting changes, every time I contemplate it. Like a person, it has mood and personality. In fact it moves, as if unrestricted by the canvas. Of course this is an effect produced in me, and not proper to the insensate painting, but what difference does it make? Only this unique painting can produce this unique experience. A painting’s first and foremost attribute is location. All paintings, in fact, all objects share in this attribute without difference. This is the first dimension, scant of revelation, seemingly unworthy of mention.* *However, no one will deny a fresco in an Etruscan villa is nothing like one displayed at the Met; and even in our rapacious society, no one has dared move the cave paintings of prehistory, or for instance, the wall paintings of El Greco in Toledo (The Parthenon, unfortunately, has lost its frieze). However, generally speaking, a painting offers no revelation if you only know where it is. Before you can experience the painting you must stand, sit, kneel, lie down, dance before it, or physically ignore it. Regardless, this collocation of work and audience is a prerequisite contextual reality that cannot be altered by moving the painting. An image printed in a book, in effect, has no location, and is not a painting, or a representation of a painting, but the reduction of a painting to an image, with flexible size and no texture, without “thing”-ness. The painting acquires its first distinction upon two dimensions. It shows a woman, gaunt and sultry, snapping her finger to release a serpentine bolt that has its direct source in her bolt-embroidered shirt. The vestment is more a second skin than a cover, suggesting the woman herself is the source, and the shirt a conduit. The bolt of yellow swirls around her breasts before extending to the fingers, from where it reaches and recoils, in shape like a question mark, through the air. The atmosphere behind her is a pulpy, ethereal landscape of white smudges, the same white as her bundled hair and ghostly skin. This image is but the surface and fixed expression that sits on the canvas, an effect impressed on two dimensions, which, whether figurative or abstract, involves form, the first revelation. The object imaged has been identified in form but without the dynamism of context, internal or external, which elicits the next layer of content. We spend time to explore the painting more; we seek the performance- of something. The action in the hand of the woman is electric, but unresolved, and one’s eyes are drawn gravitationally off-centre to her stare, aimed at the spectator without artifice or intimation. Her face withdraws with something like shame or warning; but her eyes betray a tenuous sympathy. She is beautiful, while tenebrous. One gets the exciting and displacing impression that she is looking out from the canvas at you, and also, quite cleanly, through you. One hesitates to put words in her mouth or thoughts in her mind, at first for fear they may be unspeakable, but really because they are unspoken. Uncertainty. Here one has really begun to enter the work. By the consideration of subjective qualities in the painting, which is but pigment and canvas, we experience a sense of relation. At one level, elements in the painting may relate to each other and provide internal context, adding dimensionality, activity, or significance to the image alone. At another level, the viewer may sense the hand and intention of the artist, to whom one can relate, insofar as his personality and vision are impressed in the work. But these aspects are, in the end, subordinate to the context and significance created in the room, which physically and mentally involves relation primarily between the viewer and the painting. This is the third dimension, and the second revelation. A depth has been established between the spectator and the work that begs sounding. A relationship (relation-ship!) is embarked upon, quite literally in the space between the viewer and the painting. The object has become a question to the subject; tension arises and increases. An attempt at relation is to be made or the painting abandoned. The immobile beast of oil will animate or suspire along with the intransigent mind before it. Only now does artful technique effectively come into play, when one’s attention is elsewhere, in the heart of the matter. In this painting, as with most or all of Shih’s paintings, there is no frame-that eternal manacle of imagery-to delineate the boundaries of the painting or the experience; and perspective is absent except in the depth of a cheekbone. This combination seems to press the two-dimensional image right up against the glass, so to speak, and emphasizes presence. Context and narrative are absent without loss, for the narrative is that conversation that occurs in the room, not in the painting; and the content of this painting is not an event, or even a person, but an eidolon and homunculus of the artist, and by extension, the viewer. In itself, the painting is as dumb as Frankenstein and as melodious as Circe, declaratively silent and timeless, familiar as an x-ray, and alien as the desires of another. How shall the ice be broken between the shy, voyeuristic spectator and the prudish, haughty painting, between the blind and the dumb? Will they have anything to say to each other? Roused from slumber by color, form, and texture, the faculties vie for possession of the experience. Feeling disports with mood and emotion-or the lack thereof; intellect grasps for meaning and structure-or the lack thereof; and memory attributes any and all associations without judgment. The inanimate picture is apprehended, an object undetermined, suggestive, charged with potential, and like the bolt on her fingertip, inactive, unresolved. There is, up to this point, a triadic dynamic: an object (the painting), a subject (the viewer), and a germinal relationship that is initially reactionary (attraction-repulsion, but no development, no event.* The essential dimensions of a created “thing”, height, breadth, and –through relationship- depth, are so far accomplished. But *Nothing has occurred of any significance that could not happen while staring at one’s bathroom tiles. The same are enough for the mystic or for one unchained by hallucinogens to count himself a king of infinite space, bounded by the grout*, and fill that infinity with whatever. But for most of us unimaginative sods, as of yet, there is no revelation, only feelings, ideas, associations. There is no event beyond the juxtaposition of subject and object, spectator and spectacle, plus an observance of the agitation between them. In regarding the work, a mountain of historical precedent may be reviewed, and there is no event; biographies, anthologies, reviews, and interviews can be digested ad nauseam, and there is no event; technique may be examined with exactitude: no event. For these data are indeed static: informative, but in no way creative. What then is the event? The selection of color? The geometry of composition? The “process” of the artist? The hodgepodge of sociological concepts on which professors may pounce to deconstruct? Is it the ubiquitously elusive and ever impotent message!? One factor unites the painting and its auditor, making fertile and musical the engagement: time. The painting only begins to speak, in fact to occur, in the space carved out of reality between the work and its viewer, and which exists in the moment. This is the fourth dimension, the third and crucial revelation. Now, if the painting has power, if it is imbued with any spirit (this applies equally or more to the viewer), something happens which is so powerful that some religions forbid its manifestation. By the magic of the artist, working like a god on crude matter and breathing his own spark into it, the dead thing rises; the image speaks. The mind, in delight of the image, given time, passes through the storm of analysis and feeling and clears like the eye of a hurricane. In that quiet vacuum, with swirling vengeance all around, an event takes place. That which was inanimate comes to life. A unique living experience is born in reflection with the painting. One might say the experience is one of being possessed, but it may as well be the other way around, as one is certainly, in that moment, in true possession of the painting Small wonder some religions pale to witness the power of god – the creation of life – in the hands of man, for this is high magic: void, illusory, solvent. But we are saved by our own cupidity. The eye passes and the storm returns, leaving us much the same, but anointed in the experience of another world, both inner and outer, touched. It is an experience that would satisfy both Andre Breton and the medieval Pope who declared art an acceptable conduit for worship, for it unveils the realm of the subconscious as it simultaneously showers us with the supra. If it does not the painting is a failure- and the artist in his studio is the first to know it. And so the painting of a woman on my wall, at times, in stealth or on a chariot, appears a woman in the flesh, in space and time, with something on her tongue. She speaks and though I hear no words, (as if the movement of her mouth consumed the wind of concerns and the breath of complaint within me.) I am steeped in conversation, knowing something I could only explain by making a painting, and giving it to you.