The Ten Thousand Things

Many things, one movement.

For a long time, I have wondered about the diversity in my work.

My paintings can look very different from one another. A bull, a labyrinth, an almost empty canvas, a circle, a Chinese landscape, words, colour, or simply a line.

Recently, while looking back through more than thirty years of work, something became clear to me.

For me, my work has always been a journey.

Each body of work is a different stage of that journey. I explore, I follow a line, and that line takes me somewhere else.

Once I know how to do something, I don’t want to keep repeating it. That would be too easy. I want to step outside what I already know and discover what comes next.

What I’m really investigating is how we see, how we move through life, and how one experience leads into another: through images and ideas, but also through material: paint, ink, paper, coffee, gold, colour, words, silence or simply a line.

Looking through my archive, I began to see this more clearly. The Hero’s Journey, the labyrinth, the Ox-herding pictures, Chinese calligraphy, Taoism, maps, circles, ink, words disappearing from paintings: they are not separate directions.

They are stages.

One leads to another.

In Taoist thought, the ten thousand things refers to the endless multiplicity of the world: all the different forms that arise from one source.

Perhaps that is how I have come to understand my own work.

The differences between the works are part of the journey. Each painting belongs to another moment, another question, another way of seeing.

I never wanted to find one style and keep repeating it. I wanted the work to keep moving.

Many Things, One Movement.

The Way, 2026