ontology

Maya Lin’s Storm King Wavefield

at Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY

on permanent display

Home is not a physical fact but a feeling. It can have strong ties to an actual location—where one retreats after a day of work or one’s childhood hometown, for example—but not necessarily. Because home has to do with feeling welcome, protected, comfortable. It is a point of origin where we feel we belong; it is a reference point for all that lies outside of it. That’s why we always “return” home: it is where we all started.

Some leave home and never go back. But denial does not erase an existence, not even in one’s consciousness. That is why an unexpected brush with home is more powerful—even violent—than a premeditated meeting: home unarms us.

Speaking of Maya Lin’s Storm King Wavefield, 2009 as manifestation of an “Asian aesthetic” may sound reductive, essentialist, and exclusive, none of which I endorse. However, I find it important to do so as a starting point because I could not (still cannot) fend off images of the Korean countryside upon my first encounter with Lin’s work.

I spent most of my childhood in Seoul, Korea, a small country inconspicuously wedged between the massive mainland China and the floating islands of Japan. It is a modest-sized country with oversized ambitions: its people suffer from an overflow of American capitalist consumerism, trying to compensate for thousands of years built upon Confucius values of balance, respect, and acceptance of what is given them. Living immersed in that culture, it’s easy to believe the in the unity of those ambitions and their realizations. But when I beheld an American mountain for the first time in my life, I realized how small Korean mountains were. Indeed the sublime is everywhere to be found in the United States; the Korean landscape in my memory shrinks into humility in comparison.

As a child, I had few occasions to travel outside the city, so the home in Lin’s piece is not so much my identification with the greens (my childhood is full of concrete grays), but with a disposition. Korean aesthetic in particular must be an inevitable result of a history of oppression (colonization) and limited resources. The way in which Confucianism was able to take hold of the culture was because, in a sense, reality would otherwise be unbearable. Just as Nietzsche speaks of concepts of morality (piety, mercy, forgiveness) as names given to societal gestures that had wholly different origins, Confucius’ teachings of respect (for elders, for nature) became a Korean way of life, not for its own sake, but as a way to tame the infinitely expanding ambitions of any human being that might otherwise roam freely (as in the United States or China). Hence Korean landscape architects build around what already exists at a site (a tree, a boulder) and rarely remove anything entirely. Their artificial modifications call for a minimalist approach; they even seem to have the same respect for the sky, as even palaces are more horizontal than vertical. Like living in a rented house, one may alter the space as long as one retains respect for the overall structure: the artist is nature’s tenant.

Of course, art manifesting a respect for nature is not particular to Korean culture alone. Lin has cited as an influence the Native American burial mounds she grew up seeing in Ohio. Like Korean burial mounds, they too are swellings of the earth, both protective and monumental. Human hands sculpt them to mark a past existence but the earth appears to have done the swelling to welcome the body back to its birthplace. Our place during the dormant state before birth and after death is in the womb.

Lin’s Wavefield, however, are not tombs, but fluctuating waves; if they house the dead, the dead are free to wander under each wave. The swellings are a universality rather than particularities; human identities give way to a natural ontology that no longer distinguishes between human, animal, or landscape but unites them as a single being called spirit, both living and dead.

The site exudes a generosity and warmth of an old sage who also happens to be your own grandfather. I approach the Wavefield with respect but without fear. It does not judge me but I am careful with how I take my first step; I get the sense that the place has seen it all and I want to do it the right way. There perpetually lingers in me an awareness that it knows what I do not know. It is wise—like the old master himself, not like Confucianism as coping mechanism—it rises up as if to match the American sublime darkly looming in the distance but is indifferent to it. It is gentle, yet confident: it does not shrink back with embarrassment like the Korean mountains in my memory. It beckons me to meet it while I hesitate in caution: I don’t want to disturb you..., I say, but it keeps telling me with a smile, no, no you are not disturbing me, come and sit.

The Wavefield invites us to communicate with it but the mode is not entirely human (verbal language) or even animal (body language): performatives are not compatible. But this method of exchange does resemble the moment when two animals meet for the first time: they sniff each other out. And the sniffing is not just a physical act; it’s a feeling out before making a judgment about the other (hostile or friendly?). A feeling out for vibes: in this state, one must suspend all judgments or presumptions in order to conduct a proper assessment. An encounter with the Wavefield is not a one-sided affair (bestower/receiver) but a mutual investigation, which is only possible when we return to a point of origin. But the work is all the more generous because it unconditionally welcomes us. It takes the first step to bring us home, somewhere before birth and after death, where we have all been. We begin, then, by feeling the waves breathe and accepting its invitation.