Chess

11 X 17 Inches
3-color Screen Print
Signed
Created in 2021

$30

Jorge Luis Borges is one of my favorite authors. No one else can create such penetrating, surreal enigmas. This passage embedded with a simple paradox is part of a larger story called “The Garden of Forking Paths”. That story is itself a nested paradox that has within it, a labyrinth in the form of a manuscript that people become lost in while reading. That story can be found in his 1944 collection of short stories, “Fictions”.

A koan is a sort of zen thought experiment. One that acts as a vehicle to pass the limitations of thought. They are small objects of language that trip up our logic and offer a momentary transcendence. The one that most Americans are familiar with is, “What is the sound of one hand [clapping]?” Many Koans were created by specific zen masters and recorded by their schools and there is a sort of academia around them but the nature of the koan can be found in languages and cultures throughout time and geography, often in the form of poetry or enigmatic idioms or jokes. 

These “Bodhisttva” prints pair buddhist imagery with bits of language, penned by writers that I love, that offer this kind of koan magic.