Provenance: Provenance: Private Collection, Manila

ABOUT THE WORK

One of the foremost abstract artists working today, Lao Lianben is a master of the significant gesture, able to evoke a world — or worlds — through an economy of means. In this work, one sees Lao’s favored form, which is the circle — a shape that has resonant meaning in religion, myth, and astronomy. Created in one continuous stroke, the sphere is liquid and luminous, like a heavenly body reflected on the surface of a lake, stabilized by a tight zigzag of vertical lines on the bottom part. One has to observe the empty space which the circle encloses — an absence that paradoxically asserts presence: the heart of creation itself. With a readily identifiable visual language, Lao Lianben is arguably the most notable practitioner employing the minimalist idiom, having created a body of work that is celebrated for its Zen-like purity and grace. In this particular work, the artist offers the viewer a rectangle of light that is surrounded by a void, whose blackness further magnifies the radiance that it frames. It is a portal that notonly emits light butalso enacts a contemplation of it. Upon closer look, one can detect stirrings of emergent forms, as though the shape is an arena in which the various energies of life coalesce before expressing the shapeliness of matter.