Q: You wear many different hats. In addition to playing the pipa [a four-stringed vertical Chinese lute], you are an ethnomusicologist, cultural commentator, and an accomplished practitioner of Zen Buddhism. And you've played a key role in getting some of Taiwan's modern composers into a "dialogue," so to speak, with traditional music. What is your view of modern and contemporary art?

A: Modern art is not just plastic arts. A common thread runs through modern dance, modern music, and other forms of modern art: destruction. To put it in Zen terms, it is an attempt to break free of orthodox artistic concepts and practices. From my personal perspective as someone involved in many different fields, and also from the East Asian perspective, this is a good thing. Classical Western art is very structured, and over the centuries has built up a formidable degree of internal consistency. But it is this very internal consistency that turns Western art into a closed system. When art evolves to a certain point, it becomes what is known in Buddhism as "worldly wisdom," which means to regard "the seeming" as real. The problem doesn't come up if you don't do art, but once you get involved with it, you get boxed in by established concepts and practices. That's why it's so important to have creative new concepts.

Looking at things from the perspective the Western system, the development of modern art in the West in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was almost inevitable. From an Eastern perspective, on the other hand, Western culture has been the mainstream for the past century or two. Western traditions and classical Western artistic concepts are often transplanted to other cultures like some sort of universal standard. It's a very good thing when someone steps forward to challenge this kind of orthodoxy. Regardless what perspective you're looking at it from-Eastern, Western, or crossover-one ought to welcome the rise of modern art, but I have to admit that much modern art leaves me deeply disappointed. Modern art itself has now become an orthodoxy. Quite frankly, this orthodoxy is like the emperor's new clothes. No one dares challenge it. This is perhaps the one area where modern artists most need to do some serious soul searching.

Q: While viewing the "An Award for Taipei Biennale," you mentioned the interaction between the exhibit space and artistic works in modern art. Could you expand on this point?

A: When practitioners of modern art conceive a work, they should devote serious thought to how their works interact with the surroundings, but I saw little evidence of such interaction at these exhibitions. The feeling you get from the printed materials and from the actual works is very different, which just goes to show how much art works are affected by their surroundings. No work of art can possibly be placed in different environments and still give off the exact same sort of energy. And this is especially true of modern art.

We build art museums and put art works on display in specifically chosen locations precisely because the venue so strongly affects our ability to appreciate works of art. But there are three "divorces" in modern art. One is the divorce between artists' language and the works themselves. The language that artists employ in discussing their work doesn't always say the same thing that the works themselves do. A second divorce is between works of art and their surroundings. All too often, the two conflict. And a third divorce is the different feeling you get from printed materials and actual art works.

Q: It's interesting that you mention a divorce between the printed word and actual art works. Recent modern art exhibitions have been accompanied by a considerable amount of the artists' writings. You've seen the exhibits I'm talking about. What sort of phenomenon do you feel this represents?

A: As the most interdisciplinary type of modern art-and I'm defining the term "modern art" in the broadest sense here-visual art makes the most interdisciplinary use of all kinds of media and elements. In action art, for example, there is action and performance. And conceptual art includes the written as part of the artwork. But when I see such works, I can't help wondering if the artists have actually exposed themselves to the writing or actions of others. An action artist may think that his particular action is something extraordinary even though he has never really taken in another work of performing art. Time-sensitive action is the essence of performing art, and action artists do include time-sensitive elements in their works, yet they seldom pay any attention to performing arts where time is the principal element. Sometimes we in the performing arts see performances by action artists, and we just have shake our heads and laugh.

Similarly, conceptual artists often employ all sorts of concepts and language in their works that's incomprehensible even to a professional writer like myself. The world of language includes semantics, behind which lurks a whole philosophical universe. In conceptual art, artists ought to be making use of the written word to describe their view of life and the world, but the problem is that their ideas may have already been expressed by philosophers, and expressed more clearly to boot. If an artist expresses himself primarily through visual art, but makes use of the written word to add clarity and content that can't be communicated otherwise, then the language will have power. But it seems that with the writing of visual artists, we're forced to guess at the meaning. Most people can't understand that stuff, and I wonder whether the writers themselves even understand it. When words are unintelligible to the reader, they are meaningless, unless the point right from the start was to confuse people.

I don't cut visual artists any slack on this score. They use just about every material and technique imaginable, including technology, electronics, the human body, performing arts, and philosophical concepts. There's nothing they don't draw upon. But my question is: Before they make use of these things, do they come off their high horse for even a little while and think about how little they know about all these different fields? I have strong doubts. Take John Cage, for example. He was a musician, but he's not much talked about by musicians. It's artists who are always discussing him. Everyone who has studied the history of music or has done composing is familiar with his 4'33", but that's the only thing Cage did that anyone talks about. After he achieved his "destruction," he should have taken the destroyed thing and thrown it away instead of trying to make something of it. But this is what people in the arts tend to do. I think that when modern artists express themselves in a variety of media they should also train themselves in a variety of media, rather than just using whatever comes to mind, because what you use is likely to be quite superficial, and the product of your work is probably going to lack focus and just be a weird jumble of contradictions. Works of this sort naturally have no energy.

Q: You just now brought up the Zen concept of "destruction," and when you were visiting the exhibits you said that today's visual arts mistake razzle-dazzle for real substance. Could I ask you to use the concept of "destruction" to return the visual arts to the realm of greater substance?

A: Nothing exists just for the sake of destruction. If we're only seeking destruction, then we should start by destroying ourselves, just like John Cage's 4'33" and Marcel Duchamp's Fountain. The object of action is destruction, but destruction means to "not set up scriptures," as we say in Buddhism, so when we destroy someone else, we should also destroy ourselves. That's the only way that we can allow something completely new to appear. But it seems to me that modern art, in destroying others, attempts to build itself up and create a self-justifying theoretical framework. If you want to understand my painting, for example, you have to read what I've written, and if you want to understand what I've written, you have to see my painting. How does this link the external with the self? Since artists want to exhibit their works, and since they want to make works in the first place, they are by definition engaged in artistic communication. But in modern art, we see artists destroying others while building themselves up. This is a supreme contradiction.

Destruction is not quite so difficult; construction is where you run into the biggest difficulties. Just think: Why do people feel that artists are so special? Because, in the eyes of an ordinary person, their abilities border on pure magic. A painter uses a brush, a bit of ink, and a few colors to create a world beyond anything we could imagine. A poet takes the words we all learned in elementary school and writes them into verses that people recite for centuries. Musicians compose simple sounds into musical pieces that are played for generations. Scientists have an expression for this: "The cutting edge is simply a rearrangement of the commonplace." That's what artists do. They experiment with new ways of rearranging things. That's the biggest challenge for an artist-how to construct something in a new way.

I think modern art has lost its way by mistaking destruction for construction. That's why we see one trend coming along after another, the earlier ones getting displaced without leaving behind anything lasting. It's true, of course, that Zen is only about destruction, not construction, but the real point of Zen is enlightenment, which doesn't come through half-measures. When you destroy, you don't just destroy others; you have to destroy yourself as well, to the point where you force yourself to leap from the precipice. The brilliance of enlightenment doesn't come until after "the end of all that" has come, and you stir to life once again. Once there is enlightenment, Zen enters into the realm of construction. Zen is only truly complete when destruction and construction stand side by side. But in modern art, destruction comes first, and when we try to construct something modern artists feel like we're violating their most sacred principle, as if we were doing something scandalously conservative.

Also, modern artists tend to have uptight personalities. They're continually afflicted by anxiety over their work. For them, their work is an unending process of subversion. But the destruction of Zen, ideally, leads one day to large-scale destruction and construction. The persuasiveness of modern art shouldn't derive exclusively from destruction. The "state of nothingness" should in fact be an "endless store of treasures," to borrow another Buddhist concept. To borrow on the imagery of classic poetry, there should be flowers, moonlight, pagodas. . . . When we speak of modern art, we ought to be speaking of actual works that we remember, not of "modern art" as an event in the history of art. It's got to involve a person seeing a work of art and being jolted to the core by the power of it. If that is missing, then you're only half finished with your work.

Q: You wrote a book about aesthetics of Chinese art and music, A Realistic, Affectionate Look, in which you discuss the concept of "unity of the art and artist" in traditional Chinese art. Taking this concept as the point of departure, could you tell us the main ways in which Chinese art and literati art differ from modern art and contemporary art? What is the difference in the artists' frame of mind?

A: When we talk about things modern, we have a blind spot; we think of "modern" as something that everyone must come to terms with, not realizing that the "modern" in modern art was originally used in opposition to classical Western art. Classical Western art played a big role in making modern art what it is today. For example, the rigorous structure of classical Western art and the theocracy of the medieval period forced Western artists to destroy these things in search of liberation. But why should Chinese people necessarily want this kind of modernity? Why should people on Bali want this kind of modernity? These people are already better off than their Western counterparts even without modernity.

Take installation art, for example. When all the buildings in a city are built in the classical style and all the gardens are beautifully kept, a piece of installation art adds a note of diversity, something handcrafted and just a bit oddball that makes people perk up and take notice. But in a chaotic place like Taipei, installation art can easily become just another eyesore. The setting does make a difference. I often say that Taiwan has the world's biggest piece of installation art. It's displayed periodically, and the name of the work is "Election." The whole island is plastered with pennants for an entire month or two, and the look of the place is radically changed. If you looked down on it from the air, you'd be looking at the world's biggest piece of installation art. I could call it that and claim it as my own work. I'd say that it's Lin Ku-fang's piece, and it's called "Taiwan Elections." I would get others to set it up for me, and all I would have to do is write something up to accompany it.

My point is that the word "modern" is used in opposition to the classical period in the West. It has arisen as a natural continuation of the trajectory of Western culture. Because Western cultured is the world's dominant culture, many non-Western cultures have adopted Western concepts regarding modernity while forgetting that our own cultural milieus are not completely the same as that of the West. Modern artists often treat Western ideas as if they were universal in their application, which is very dangerous.

As for the difference between modern art and classical Eastern art. I think that Eastern art basically puts heavy stress on the idea that to be highly accomplished as an artist one must also be highly accomplished as a human being. I think this applies equally to the art of Japan, Korea, India, and China, which is why in China and India we find that a philosopher is also a man of action. Breaking free of your limitations isn't something that you just write about; it's something that you do. But the written word provides a view of the writer, because the two are of a piece.

The China Times once sponsored an exhibit on Tibetan Buddhism and asked me to write the material for the exhibit guides. The name of one painting translated into English as "Great Successes and Great Philosophers," but in the Tibetan system there is no thing as a person who achieves great success who is not a great philosopher, and there is no great philosopher who is not a great success. If he doesn't achieve success, then his philosophy is just empty words. He can only achieve as much success as there is sense in his ideas. Practice and theory are two sides of the same coin, so why should there be an "and" in the English? Is there one kind of person that we call a great philosopher and another kind that we call a great success? Well, that's precisely the Western way of looking at things.

Modern art is based to a great degree on Western concepts, which is why you'll find that the artist's life and the works themselves are somewhat divorced from each other. Or to put it another way, the works have nothing to do with any breaking free on the part of the artist from his limitations. That is one reason why works of modern art are powerless in some ways. An artist will pose a trenchant question, but we find that the artist himself is not persuasive. There's a "parting of the ways between the art and the artist." But this parting of the ways doesn't mean that the art doesn't have sense or meaning. It's simply that modern artists have got themselves snagged on certain points, and there are some things that haven't matured into anything of lasting significance, which is perhaps related to the fact that there's not "construction" in modern art, as I was mentioning before. Everyone strives to put forward new concepts and new works, but if you look you'll find that in their lives and in their thoughts, they're just running in place.

But classical art, both Eastern and Western, stresses the importance of unity of the art and the artist. There's one type of activity that's closely related to this idea, and that is practice-the act of practicing to master artistic technique. I'll give you an example. Suppose a person practices calligraphy every day. If that person produces beautiful calligraphy, you'd be wrong to think that beautiful calligraphy is all there is to it. The entire person goes through a transformation. If you paint every day, it will change your character. We anthropologists stress that repetition is no sin, and in fact is very meaningful. With lots of things, you don't really have a feel for it if you just do it once, but if you do it a thousand times, it's a different story. But many avant-garde artists just do things once. And it's the same with a lot of avant-garde musicians-their first performance of a work is also their last. This aversion to repetition flies in the face of the facts of life, and I'd like to ask modern artists: Why can't you practice unity between life and art with regard to this point?

Q: While we were looking at works for "An Award for the Taipei Biennale," you said that modern artists "play too seriously and make subversion into something all too sacred." So it appears that you were not too impressed on the whole. Were there any works that made a particularly strong impression on you?

A: When I said that modern artists "play too seriously and make subversion into something all too sacred," I was thinking about the way a dog plays. He chases after a ball and chomps on it. Or maybe the ball gets away from him sometimes, but it's all the same to the dog. It's just fun. Modern artists will often let on as if they're just playing around when in fact they're dead serious, which sometimes leads to all sorts of contradictions. We take a commonplace medium, tell ourselves it's something sacred, and then write about it in the most incomprehensible language we can. But if something truly doesn't have any hold on you, then why not just walk away from it? For example, if I don't think the degree I'm working on is meaningful to me, I can just drop out of school, can't I? That would be better than staying there struggling. There's a similarly strange situation in modern art.

When I say that they make subversion into something all too sacred, I mean that thoroughgoing subversion will be directed toward oneself as well, but the subversives treat themselves as sacred. Small wonder that many people not part of the art scene are so mystified by what they see in museums. Ordinary objects become sacred as soon as they're put on display there. Is it the way they're displayed that's sacred? Is it the artworks themselves? The museum? I think this question is worth some serious thought. Why has this situation arisen? In the first place, it's because artists put concept before the work. Art is absolutely not a concept. Concepts are for philosophers to deal with. Art is all about how to transform concepts into works of art. These works will always be everything to art. Without such works, there can be no art. So we have to be concerned about where an artwork's power is.

And there's another important question we have to ask: When we're creating an artwork, what is the connection between the work and our own lives? The work will focus on some subject or other, but is it a subject we truly care about? Or is it something we stumbled across and decided to make use of? Let's say our work of art is a protest against modern civilization, for example. Does this protest come from within? Is it central to the artist's existence? Or is it just something that the artist happened upon in searching for a theme for his or her art? If the latter, then the work will be lacking in sincerity, and it won't be highly regarded.

If you want me say what I consider relatively good, I would mention Shi Jin-hua's Pencil Walker. Regardless whether you like the work or not, the weaknesses I was just discussing are not so apparent. Firstly, Shi focuses on such questions as how we are to live our lives? Can we, in the process of repetition, actually leave behind anything of lasting value? These questions are very important to him. Secondly, he really did go and practice his ideas, and after a long period of gestation, his work sprang forth. I think the power of a work and the attitude of the artist are still the main factors determining the quality of an artwork. This applies to both classical and modern art. Without these things, there can be no art. Some works are not focused, while others have no deep connection with the artist.

I think if we had invited artists from outside the field of visual arts to come and critique "An Award for Taipei Biennale," they could have provided some very trenchant insights, because the impact of modern art on classical art has been a matter of the external challenging the internal. External concepts pounded away at an internally closed system. As I was saying before, modern art has become somewhat closed itself over the past 100 years, and it is now making use of things that originally belonged to other artistic fields. Regardless whether artists from outside the field of visual arts are actually on target with their comments, subjecting modern art to some criticism by such artists could only be good for modern art.

Take action art, for example. A good performer can command an audience's attention just through the power of the performance, without saying anything at all. But I often see action artists talking and talking, but when finally get down to the actual performance, I feel so embarrassed for the performers' sake that I can't even stand to watch. I just have to leave. So I think it might help modern art mature a bit if we subjected it to an outside challenge.

There are too many people running around wearing "the emperor's new clothing" in modern art, but it's rather difficult for someone inside modern art circles to challenge anything because modern art has carte blanche rights to the status of modernity. Anyone who challenges that is automatically seen as having fallen away from the leading edge. Also, a complex relationship has grown up between modern art and the news media, where the media gives much more extensive coverage to modern art than it does to other types of art. There is lots of reporting on modern art activities at all the museums because news reports talk about events, not about actual works of art. But when we go to see the art, it's the art we're appreciating, not the event. Of course, you could say that an event is a work of art in and of itself, but that's beside the point.

My point is that the relationship between modern art and the media is another factor that makes it very difficult for anyone to challenge modern art. Imagine just for a second-not that it would actually be done-but just image what would happen if they prohibited the media from reporting on modern art. Right way you would see what a huge role the media, especially the mass media, has played in promoting modern art. Leaving aside the question of whether or not it's a good thing, the fact is that much of modern art's power is actually generated by the media. Under the circumstances, it is really quite difficult to challenge modern art, so we just have to let events take their course. That's how there has gradually come to be so much of the emperor's new clothing over the years.

When Snow in August was staged last year, nine out of ten people from theater circles said it was lousy, but the media praised it to the heavens. So it turns out that the mechanisms of modern civilization don't allow us quite the degree of freedom that we imagined for ourselves. Modern artists may believe that they have broken through the strictures of classical art, but in fact they are unaware that they have simply jumped from one enclosure into another-trading complicity in one conspiracy for complicity in another, one that robs them and others of their freedom in a different way. That's why there is so much of the emperor's new clothing on display. This is when you need to invite a few children to come in and have a look. And that's what you did by inviting some "white-haired children" like myself. We came and said: "Hey, I don't understand. This is no good. You guys are nuts."

So, let the modern artists sneer about how I don't understand modern art! I will have achieved my purpose. You know, it's not tough to make up the sort of fluff those people write. Let's give it a go right now: "As I lay there on the frozen pavement thinking of the fragrance emanating from the distant stars, suddenly it wafted into my ears." What do you think? Does it sound about like what they write? But it doesn't mean a thing. Recently I got a bunch of laughs when I imitated the vocal style of Snow in August. I'll tell you, it's really hard to think of a good reason why anyone should sing like that. And they call that music? After Snow in August, I went around asking people in cultural circles what they thought of it, just to see who had knuckled under to the pressure to conform. If they said, "It was no good," they passed my test. But some would hem and haw without quite saying what they meant. It's that sort of person who needs to have a kid come and tell the truth about the emperor's new clothing.

And one final point. After bin Laden brought down the World Trade Center in New York right before our eyes, a lot of painters and playwrights told me they felt that they were not doing very good work, and that they should redouble their efforts. In fact, if 9-11 had happened after business hours, and there was no one in the buildings, that could have been the work of art to put an end to modern art. I mean, really, it would have been exactly the thing to do the trick, as though the whole thing were planned out, put on display for everyone and endlessly replayed so that modern civilization has no choice but to face it directly. Without spending a thing on publicity, the terrorists delivered a huge shock. And there's no end to what you can draw from it. It could be something as small as the rage of an individual, or something as sweeping as the conflict of civilizations. If 9-11 had been a work of art, we would have to consider it the ultimate expression of action art and conceptual art. Of course, artists can tell us that 9-11 was different from our art, that it involved the deaths of 2,800 people, but it nevertheless offers something to make us think seriously and critically.

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Modern art itself has now become an orthodoxy. This orthodoxy is like the emperor's new clothes. No one dares challenge it. This is perhaps the one area where modern artists most need to do some serious soul searching.

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Modern art has lost its way by mistaking destruction for construction. That's why we see one trend coming along after another, the earlier ones getting displaced without leaving behind anything lasting.

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Modern art has lost its way by mistaking destruction for construction. That's why we see one trend coming along after another, the earlier ones getting displaced without leaving behind anything lasting.

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The essence of modern art is the destruction of the sacredness of art. Do modern artists achieve this? Or are they just bamboozling us?(courtesy of Yao Jui-chung)

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Classical art, both Eastern and Western, stresses the importance of unity of the art and the artist. There's one type of activity that's closely related to this idea, and that is practice-the act of practicing to master artistic technique.

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Eastern art emphasizes that completion of artworks and completion of the artist are one and the same thing. Contemporary art seeks to escape the bounds of conventional artistic concepts, but does it have the power to jolt its viewers to the core of their being? Shown here (background) is an autobiographical poem written in the 8th century by the Tang poet Huai Su. (courtesy of the National Palace Museum)

In our crowded, chaotic cities, what do we need from art? Should we just pile up more and more works of art? Or should we be shooting for something else? (photo by Jimmy Lin)