Beyond Borders · The Art of Empathy

A domain is the boundary of a country, but it can also mean any delimited sphere. In the Records of the Grand Historian, the biographies of Lu Zhonglian and Zou Yang describe “ranging beyond the bounds of conventional argument, and contemplating an open and clear way.” The passage suggests that speaking without restriction allows one to perceive a clear and honorable path. “Beyond the domain” thus acquires a particular importance. Here, artists beyond borders are those unconstrained by national boundaries or any other limitation. This offers the highest praise for freedom of thought and affirms the traces artists leave in the history of human thinking.

Across the long course of human development, thought has often been carried forward through the words of celebrated figures and masters. Yet in the play of ideas, even a theory that accounts for everything on its own terms can scarcely withstand the heavy blows of reality. Life quietly tears at and wounds the empiricist. In the face of suffering, artistic empathy helps humanity move forward, faltering though it may be.

As in Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy, an argument built upon pure logic, abstraction is not the final proposition of this world: empathy has a more human significance. Ever since human feeling found artistic expression, artworks have taken different forms and modes of presentation. Artists have not always stood at the forefront of human civilization; rather, they attend more closely to human emotions and continually seek different ways of communicating them.

Humanity has never been far from viruses; epidemics have accompanied its development. Human history is also a history of confrontation and balance between people and viruses. The present pandemic has become the background to our time and lives, one that none of us can avoid.

Artists, among the most sensitive of human beings, are naturally alert to change and are magicians skilled in empathy.

The reflections presented here by twenty-seven artists from twelve countries do not attempt to prescribe a standard way for audiences to face the pandemic. Through encounters with these artists, perhaps we may find another version of ourselves in a parallel world.