Folding the Cosmos into My Heart

This painting is my attempt to fold the immense cosmos onto a single canvas. It was not to diminish vast and boundless things, but stemmed from my strong sense that the ‘Heart’ and the ‘Cosmos’ are fundamentally no different even amidst that immensity.

It is often said, "In a single speck of dust, there are three thousand great chiliocosms." This teaching holds that infinite worlds reside within a tiny particle. The planets and clouds in the painting float in a vast space yet flow somewhere. That flow, much like our consciousness, is constantly changing, fragmenting, merging again, and then vanishing. While creating this work, I folded the cosmos. I folded it again and again, with a single line and a single color, and finally placed it inside my heart.

That heart is not grandiose. It is simply a heart that observes, questions, and listens quietly. If this small painting can unfold again within the viewer's heart, that would truly be my greatest wish and my spiritual practice. The artist in me does not precisely know my own heart. Yet, I say that ‘I paint the cosmos with my heart’. The cosmos is the same. I have not been there and I do not know it, but I simply paint it, believing, ‘It must be the cosmos.’ Thus, I did not intend to paint the cosmos— I merely looked into my heart, and there the cosmos was.