This practice-led research investigates how painting can stage a spiritual encounter by embodying the principles of non-duality, self-dissolution, and meditative awareness drawn from Zhuangzi’s Daoist philosophy and Mahāyāna Buddhist thought. Rather than illustrating doctrine, the project explores how spiritual experience may be transmitted through perceptual and affective conditions—through atmosphere, gesture, and the dissolution of fixed form. Situated within a diasporic and intercultural framework, the research responds to the pressures of legibility and assimilation placed on immigrant subjects in contemporary Western society. It critically resists the superficial appropriation of Eastern philosophies within global art discourse by engaging these traditions not as stylistic motifs but as lived metaphysical commitments. The creative practice comprises oil painting and carved wood panels, which operate as perceptual thresholds rather than narrative images. Distorted self-portraiture and fragmentary forms cultivate a state of contemplative uncertainty, where the viewer encounters transitional states between appearance and disappearance. Through slow materiality, veiling, and atmospheric depth, my painting extends into the field of affect, echoing Elizabeth Grosz’s notion of ‘becoming’ as continual transformation.
Ultimately, painting is reframed as a durational event, neither representation nor object, but a site of relational attunement in which seeing becomes a mode of being.
