todo menos el objeto 2010

Zen is a school of Buddhism that originated in China. It spread to other Asian countries including Japan, where it is fully integrated into the culture, traditions and everyday life. Today, Japanese Zen has gained noticeable popularity in the Western world, however, mostly in forms of stereotype products, beauty salons and in some cases even combined with yoga. (Mis)Interpretations of Zen religion or way of life remain on an aesthetic level and in commercial terms.

Examples:
枯山水 (in roman “karesansui”) literally means “dead mountain water”. Commonly translated as “Zen garden” in the English language. Zen monks create patterns with dry sand in a karesansui to help meditation. Nowadays it is easy to find miniature versions of karesansui – an imitation of the original at a therapist’s office or a static ornament for a coffee table.

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Orientalism denotes all activities that associate with Eastern cultures in the West - from academic studies to artistic imitations. The term “study” may identify some degree of objectivity, however, one should be aware that the study of a foreign culture never breaks free of prejustice, the burden of history, conventional definition, stererotype and the expense of personal baggage.

In his book Orientalism, Edward Said defines the term as “a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience.” What he refers to is that “The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and riches and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural context, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other.”(p.1) He speaks of “a fairly constant sense of confrontation felt by Westerners dealing with the East. The Boundary notion of East and West, the varying degrees of projected inferiority and strength, the range of work done, the kinds of characteristic features ascribed to the Orient” which “testify to a willed imaginative and geogbraphic division made between East and West” (p. 201). Edward Said regards Orientalism as “a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient” and that “The Orient is taught, researched, administered, and pronounced upon in certain discrete ways”(p.202) since the nature of Western attitudes towards the East based on an ideological way to deal with the “otherness”.

The author claims that his “whole point about this system is not that it is a misrepresentation of some Oriental essence — in which I do not for a moment believe — but that it operates as representations usually do, for a purpose, according to a tendency, in a specific historical, intellectual, and even economic setting” (p. 273). It should be made clear that the definition of the term itself varies depending on the context and the connotation it is given - in my case, the scope of Orientalism lies within opposing duality of the East and the West, the Orient and the Occident, the inferior and the superior, and one and the other.

Edward Said regards “the journey, the history, the fable, the stereotype, the polemical confrontation” as “the lenses through which the Orient is experienced, and they shape the language, perception, and form of the encounter between East and West” (p. 58) Therefore I question: Is it possible to study or interpret the essence of Asian cultures without the issue of biased translation? That is to say: a direct and authentic contact to the subject devoid of any kind of interference?

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Interaction between the East and the West initiated as early as the West Han Dynasty (202BC - 8AD) when Zhang Qian, a Chinese imperial envoy,  began his exploration in Chang’an (now Xi’an, in inner China) and reached till the Mediterranean. Trading soon prospered on the new established route which later became known as the Silk Road - for silk was the most popular trade product from the East to the West. Europe’s trading with China had been growing more intensely ever since and today, with the rising potential of the unexploited continent, businessmen in the more advanced West still see China as their 15th Century explorers did - a “big piece of meat” of tremendous profits and benefits.

Maybe this is how it all went wrong. If the first explorers were scholars not merchants and the first interactions between Europe and China were based on interests for each other’s cultures and not how much advantage one can take of the other, perhaps the Occident would have a totally different view and understanding the Orient.

daisy General daisy