From Abundance Towards Attention

Working on The Formless Track, my collaboration with Zen Master Hyon Gak Sunim, has led me to reflect on my own role as an artist. Sunim is the teacher. The Zen teaching is his. My role is akin to that of an ancient monastic illuminator: not to write the text, but to create a visual and musical frame through which it may be encountered afresh.

As an artist, the only thing I can speak about is the artistic process: how sound, image, rhythm, silence, repetition and attention can be brought together around material of great depth without reducing it to decoration.

At the same time, my visual practice has been transformed by generative image systems. As a digital artist since the 1990s, I find these tools both extraordinary and challenging. They create an overwhelming abundance of images and variations. If generation becomes almost effortless, where does the artist’s responsibility now lie?

The phrase from abundance towards attention has become a useful way for me to think about that question.

This is simply a personal reflection on artistic practice in an age when creative tools can produce more than any individual can absorb.

For me, creativity now moves increasingly towards recognition, selection, cutting, sequencing and restraint: from creation, to curation, to cultivation. Hundreds of images may appear, but only a few have the internal tension or presence to remain. The question becomes: why this image, and not another?

Attention is not passive looking; it is an active form of care. To select an image, refine it, place it within a series and give it the conditions to be properly seen is already a creative act.

This is the connection between The Formless Track and my personal artwork: a recurring concern with attention. How do we hold something still long enough for meaning to emerge? How do we choose, shape and present work responsibly when the means of production become abundant?

These thoughts are not a doctrine or conclusion. They are a working reflection from inside my own practice. The tools will continue to change. The responsibility to look carefully, choose honestly and shape with restraint remains with the artist.