Floating World The term Ukiyo- Japanese for “floating world”- is familiar to many Westerners through the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century woodblock prints depicting the leisurely world of often illicit entertainment districts of many Japanese cities during this period. Kabuki actors, courtesans, musicians, prostitutes, and drinking houses became popular artistic subjects as an improving Japanese economy allowed an expanding merchant class to enjoy these pleasures not available to their peasant ancestors. The name for these districts- floating worlds- derived from the belief that life should be lived purely for the moment. Helpless in an ever-changing world beyond our control, we float like gourds on a river of impermanence, to paraphrase Asai Ryoi. (The pleasure industry even became known as the “water trade”.) Life is short, the thinking went, let’s enjoy it! Since studying this in college (my major was East Asian History) one little thing that has always stuck in my mind is that this term was not originally intended to be a fun one. Medieval Buddhists used the same phrase as a meditation on the central, essential sadness of life- we are helpless in an ever-changing world beyond our control, and we float like gourds on a river of impermanence. A tragic, lamentable way to live, and one should thus concentrate on the transcendent and permanent. It was only later, when there was more money and leisure time, that it came to be seen that constant change could be a fun thing, a diversion from the mundane. I have always found these opposing interpretations of change interesting in my little studies of chance and causality, especially when considering time as the medium through which change occurs. One view focused entirely on the moment, the other on the infinite. Both emphasize that our existence is very fleeting. I have always felt that people really don’t have a handle on just how immense time is- evolutionary, geological, and cosmic time. This is perhaps one reason why many people cannot accept an idea such as evolution as an agent of change- not only a need for a sense of permanence, but an inability to truly understand just how long a thousand million years is- and then realize this is only a fourth of our planet’s existence, and that our sun and planet themselves were created from previous, far older stars whose lives were long over. These things are easy to read as facts or theories in a book, but are truly difficult things to actually wrap your mind around, especially when to us a few hundred years of history is a very long time. A lot of things happen in a given amount of time: the constellations in the sky are constantly changing, but we can’t see it. Our existence is very fleeting- what do we do with it? There is very little direct relation at all to Japanese or any Asian art in this show. The pieces here certainly don’t resemble the ukiyo-e prints that started me thinking about all this. Only the Haiku Machine, which randomly composes confident odes to the permanence of our existence as its words are constantly shifted, follows any traditional Asian art form. In this show, I am investigating ever-expanding periods of time, changes forced upon us by chance, and the decisions we make about how we use our brief time here- the intersections of time, chance, and human will. |
