[Han Shan Exit; Brice Marden, 1992]

An exit from the valley for the top of the mountain?  Or an exit from the top of the mountain for the valley? The rumor of Han Shan’s fragmented verse was collected from jumbles found on the sides of caves and surrounding boulders.  A calligraphic mess rooted in a dualism of transcendence and emotional expression. So I can’t imagine this wild goat of a man sat much in lotus. Woven sandals instead to endlessly hobble along while the sides of his crag tumbled down in ragged chunks of stone and cascading waterfalls and at the same time, atop this gravitation of debris, light from the sun and moon and the never-fully-known-stars always effortlessly rising and radiating the boundlessness of the peaks he found hidden above the clouds. When thinking about such a dweller, at play within these pure lands, how could a legend not have been born?