Editor’s note: This interview first appeared in Wenbo Time. Interviewers: Song Yan and Liu Jinfeng. Read the original:Cheng Qing: Stop “Extractive” Museum-Going | Conversation。

 

Cheng Qing: The boom did not begin in the last two years. Earlier we noticed people with some professional experience developing this interest. There are several reasons. Most generally, once people acquire some wealth, cultural needs inevitably follow.

Another reason is the discussion of young people lying flat. Once material development reaches a certain level, we reconsider personal meaning and life’s value. At that point, the urge naturally arises to seek foundations of value through many art forms.

Most of us may simply follow a trend, but within the broader national culture it reflects aconsciousness of seeking roots.For over forty years, Chinese people mainly looked toward Europe and America, adopting the surface of modernization through materialism, technology, and science. The inner core—Chinese cultural values—went largely undiscussed. In recent years I have sensed a complex return to tradition. One widespread factor isthe search for cultural identity.。

The popularity of Chinese-style fashion and Han clothing among young people combines cultural identity, aesthetic need, and existential value. Of course there are utilitarian motives too. Many parents give children museum and exhibition visits without possessing the cultural background themselves, so they hand them to agencies, contributing to disorder in museums. This is a necessary stage as public cultural and aesthetic literacy grows in any late-developing country. Japan experienced it too: newly wealthy farmers once behaved rudely and shouted in Western museums. Societies inevitably pass through such a process.

 

Cheng Qing: Art and visits to antiquity have healing power. A work or monument expands our scale of history, space, and spirit. Great art contains a spiritual breadth rarely encountered. Standing before the great structure of Foguang Temple, one’s scale shrinks before its grandeur and passage through time; itgradually turns a person inward.Before something physically greater or spiritually deeper, one escapes narrow self-observation and self-imposed limits.

So although we appear to attend exhibitions, seek antiquity, and hear lectures, we are searching beyond narrow personal experience for something larger. It lifts us from daily worries and trivialities and heals naturally.

Confined to cramped interpersonal and trivial experiences, people easily close themselves off. We need a larger object of contemplation: vast in space and time, transcending history, or deep within spirit.

Cheng Qing: Encountering greatness differs from wanting to be great. Before a vast order—art, architecture, or long history—we feel human limitation and become humble before something great, unknowable, even mysterious. The lesser self is subdued. A once-enormous ego gradually becomes humble, inclusive, and open through looking.

If I understand your example, it is precisely what this kind of viewing opposes. Wanting greatness raises the self to supremacy, reflecting a serious modern condition:treating the individual as excessively important.。

This leads either to nihilism and collapse when one fails, or arrogance when the ego can expand. Great art and architecture instead teach humility, inclusion, and openness. The two differ.

Cheng Qing: Yes. For years I have wanted to recover special inner sensitivities erased by our education. Namely,when self-consciousness is too strong, beauty becomes difficult to experience.Many friends have had this experience. As classical-music lovers, they describe something almost mystical: when the lesser self falls away, a greater spiritual order touches them. They may weep and feel ecstasy. This isaesthetic experience of art.For me it can arise before great buildings, historical remains, or visual art. It is not designed; it often arrives accidentally.

Aesthetic experience contains randomness and chance, which makes it deeply moving.

Cheng Qing: Make the mind simple and experience directly.Intuitionis crucial,while modern looking carries too much intellectualism.

Museum visitors often rush to photograph labels and acquire information instead of appreciating a vessel or work. Looking becomes knowledge acquisition, making the experience I described difficult. Someone may discourse expertly on every object, but true looking means meeting the work directly, putting aside its baggage and symbols, and asking what you feel from it.

In museums of developed countries, many people return regularly rather than only for new shows. They learn through looking. Sometimes a changed state of mind suddenly reveals something new in a work. This chance encounter is full of surprise.

Cheng Qing: Yes. Museum studies is popular, but its professional framework can differ from exploring beauty. Its knowledge and specialization are forms of intellectualism. Ordinary people need aesthetic experience more because it heals.

Today’s return to art and longing for ancient beauty expresses an inner need for healing. Falling back into a knowledge system only adds anxiety and another burden to exhibitions and aesthetics.

Cheng Qing: This may be the cost and aftereffect of forty years of economic growth. Taste and other senses have dulled after blindly seeking satisfaction outside. Why are tea drinking and longing for nature increasing? They are efforts and preparations for looking inward. With this awareness, more people will settle, allowing the mind to recover its original sensitivity. That is the first step.

At university I sometimes organize meditation experiences. Students discover how coarse and dim their former sensitivity was. Our generation, perhaps several generations, must relearn this. Not everyone can attend specialized retreats, but everyone can experience beauty.

This raises another issue:the aesthetic environment matters.It is hard to imagine a beautiful experience in an overcrowded museum or gallery.

Our looking is extractive: I arrived, photographed, checked in, posted, and finished. We do not look quietly and steadily. Looking does not mean reducing a work to knowledge; it meansmeeting the work directly.That matters becausea work is not a piece of knowledge but a concrete presence.We sometimes overcomplicate art and miss the spiritual atmosphere the artist intentionally or unintentionally expressed. Perceiving it requires a good environment.

Cheng Qing: First create time and space to be with yourself. In internet society, information overwhelms us constantly and the mind rarely settles. Even while the body rests, the mind runs at high speed.

Cheng Qing: Yes. The Japanese tea ceremony is elaborate to focus the mind continuously and sustain awareness of body and mind. It trains attention and observation and has become part of daily Japanese culture.

Our society’s most common word is anxiety: inability to settle or observe one’s present state. Daily life, family, work, and public behavior consequently show agitation and hostility. Social education requires many spaces, not only schools: galleries, museums, tearooms, calligraphy studios, and sutra-copying rooms together form an education.

 

Cheng Qing: After World War II, Japan strongly exported culture. Scholars and Zen teachers such as D. T. Suzuki had major influence in Europe and America. Their core contribution was an epistemology and methodology for understanding world and self, mainly through Zen, which fascinated Western audiences.

Many were influenced. The greatest effect was a new understanding of the human-world relationship. Contemporary artists such as Duchamp tried to restore direct seeing to art, aided by Zen. Direct experience applies to aesthetics, daily life, and nature: meeting the external world directly weakens rationalist habits.

Japan shows that China’s revival of tradition in modern society need not reproduce traditional forms. It may revive the underlyingmode of thought.We need not return to antiquity or view only ancient art. The question is whether ancient art reveals the minds and worlds behind it.

Looking at Song ceramics and landscapes, we ultimately seek the Song mind and sensibility. Japanese Zen’s Western success offers this lesson. If Westerners can appreciate this cognitive mode and taste, Chinese people raised within its culture should be able to make the transition still more readily.

 

Cheng Qing: We curated it because we love these works, believe they offer beautiful experiences, and know the larger power of Zen thought within them. Presented together in a gallery, they can also return to individual homes.

Depending on weather or mood, I choose themed calligraphy, sometimes randomly hanging whatever I draw. It heals everyday life by bringing us into contact with experiences once thought irrelevant, especially art.

Chinese aesthetic experience and consumption are only beginning. Many young people decorate their homes with Western paintings they find beautiful, classical or abstract. I am glad tastes are changing. Friends around Jiangsu and Zhejiang are also becoming interested in Zen calligraphy. It is a trend.

Cheng Qing: Certainly many things. The experience need not be tears; it may be sudden inner fullness and a sense that one’s spirit is not alone. That is precious because people often feel disconnected from the world. Great work suddenly produces rich connection and reveals how a great mind expresses itself. You think, “How meaningful it is to be alive!” Aesthetic experience relieves the exhaustion and emotion of daily trivia. I have often felt this.

Cheng Qing: I strongly recommend Shanxi’s historic architecture. Traveling twice from north to south, I found it a symbol of Chinese culture we are only beginning to recognize. Many buildings gave me utterly different experiences, accessible to Chinese sensibility. Start with architecture and grottoes. If possible, see Chinese Song and Yuan painting in Japan, including the Tokyo National Museum. It is an introduction to our now-unfamiliar cultural spirit.

Cheng Qing: As a Buddhist historian I usually encounter Ming and Qing temples. Shanxi, including Datong, has Liao and Jin sites such as Huayan Temple, and earlier Nanchan and Foguang temples. Their architecture expresses space and time with direct grandeur, dignity, and beauty. From the entrance and heavenly-kings arrangement onward, layout and sculpture differ from later temples and create another religious experience. At Yulin Caves near Dunhuang, I accompanied monastics who received permission to chant the Great Compassion Mantra inside. The cave’s acoustics instantly awakened sacred feeling and religious emotion.

Ancient architecture is a total expression, understood through encounter. Our Yulin experience happened by chance: when chanting began, goosebumps rose. Imagine ancient people chanting, circumambulating, burning incense, and bowing there daily. A connection with them appeared that books and albums could never convey. Personal experience makes historic buildings and art intimate and nourishing.

 

Cheng Qing: Why do we need art and the humanities? They restore human warmth. When people think AI can become identical to us, they reduce humans to machines. This severely challenges Chinese humanistic and art education. Piano and painting lessons should cultivate appreciative listeners and viewers, not professionals. Keep a child’s senses open and flexible; in the right setting, ability emerges. Utilitarian education destroys pleasure. We need only teach people how to appreciate.