The octopus motif was used in the Western “Yellow Peril” narrative in the 19th and early 20th Centuries to instill fear among the public about the threat of Asian expansion. Tentacles were seen as spreading Asian or evil influence, particularly Japan’s rising military and economic power challenging Western dominance. Ironically, early scientific misunderstandings portrayed the octopus as a metaphor for central controls whereas modern science reveals tentacles functioning as a distributed brain of the octopus. Octopi can appear strange to our mammalian, vertebrate senses formed by a central nervous system. To understand the cephalopodan, you would want to appreciate its less hierarchical brain structure. Octopi navigate their tentacles which serve as sensory perception, locomotion, camouflage, and communication, utilizing their relatively decentralized brain structure that is very different from our own.  

Our belief system commands how we see the world. Instead of expressing her single point of view of the world as a landscape, a traditional Eastern painter put herself into the landscape. The subject and object are blurred because the artist produced a reverse point of view, while aiming to lose subjectivity, an artistic practice evolving since the 6th Century up until modernity. What draws me today are works by fellow Asian artists who suggest a turn inward. Awareness of the Asian self seems to create a boundary between subject and object that feels more Cephalopodan than Mammalian. Themes of our images begin with intimate emotions arising from our personal lives, but by default, the personal embodies the collective in Asia. Works are created with sensibilities of texture and materiality rather than a Cartesian sense of space. Sentiments do not construct an “interiority” of an artist, but rather echo it, while maintaining an impersonal subjectivity. Like the tentacles of an octopus, the high context signal requires a more immediate vision of the world that is more tactile than optical.