Echoes of One Hand Clapping Picturing Sound in Asian Art

Sound cannot be seen, but it can be heard and felt as vibrations, and it has the ability to move the spirit through music and memory. These experiences allow the knowledge and presence of sound to be visualized in painting, calligraphy, poetry, and photography. Featured in this special installation are Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Asian-inspired works of art ranging from the twelfth century to the present day that are drawn from the Museum’s collections and from the collection of Gérard and Dora Cognié.

Artists picture sound in various ways. Some depict actions or things that generate noise, such as a gurgling stream or booming waterfall. In Kobayashi Kiyochika’s rendering of a wartime explosion, a flash of light, fire, and flying debris are used to convey the impact of sound. Sometimes the very process of applying ink or color is used to emulate sound, as in Li Huasheng’s brooding grid, painted in a way that mimics ritual chants. Inspired by the sound of Buddhist prayer chants in Himalayan monasteries—and their purpose of focusing the mind—Li began painting vertical and horizontal lines as a visual, instead of aural, means of achieving mental focus.

Calligraphy captures in traces of the brush and ink the sounds of languages, some almost forgotten. A barely remembered calligraphic script in Vietnam conjures the sound of the past and joins it to the country’s rapidly changing present. Married to painting and calligraphy, poetry can evoke or activate the echoes of sound, as in the case of Shitao’s Echo. The brevity of Shitao’s brush and ink expresses an intimate dialogue with lonely mountains and silent clouds. Like the sound of one hand clapping, here the poem fills the land with quiet reverberations. The artist’s calligraphy quotes a couplet by the famed Song dynasty poet and calligrapher Su Shi (1036–1101):

An echo rebounds with every whisper;

Startling, on the empty mountain, the white cloud.

The question of picturing sound also resonates in Minor White’s photographic sequence The Sound of One Hand Clapping. Paradoxical statements of questions, known in Japan as kōan, are used in Zen Buddhist meditative practice. White was well acquainted with the kōan “two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand?” which is attributed to the monk Hakuin Ekaku (1686–1768). White wrote, “After several months of intensive work on this kōan, I saw rather than heard any sound.” When White saw his earlier photograph The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Pultneyville, New York, the kōan sprang to his mind, and later he added another nine photographs to his sequence of echoes.

Cary Y. Liu

Nancy and Peter Lee Curator of Asian Art