The Ox Inside the Circle, chapter 36 from The Works

The circle did not remain empty for long.

Images began to enter it.

Among them was the ox.

My fascination with the ox had begun many years earlier. In 2003 I had already worked with the ancient Zen story of the Ten Oxherding Pictures: the search for the ox, the discovery of its traces, the struggle to catch it, and finally the return to the world.

The ox was never merely an animal.

It represented something elusive.

The mind.

The self.

The thing we search for, even though it has never really been absent.

In 2023 I returned to these images.

I copied the scenes from a small book about the ox. I did not invent the compositions, nor did I try to modernise them. I was drawn to the different stages of the journey and wanted to paint them again, slowly, one by one.

Copying was not an attempt to claim the images as my own.

It was a way of entering them.

The small paintings became exercises in attention.

A figure searching.

A footprint.

A glimpse of the ox.

A rope.

A struggle.

A moment of rest.

The images were simple, but each one contained an entire state of mind.

Placed inside the circle, they became fragments of an inner journey.

The ancient story entered the form that had recently appeared in my own work.

The story was inherited.

The circle was mine.

At the time, I thought of the circle as a space that could contain an image.

A small world.

A stage.

A window through which a story could be seen.

So I filled it.

Only later did I begin to wonder whether the circle had needed an image at all.

Perhaps its power had been present before anything entered it.

Perhaps it was not a window, but a disc.

A form moving across another form.

One circle turning over another.

Appearing.

Covering.

Revealing.

Disappearing again.

Looking back, I sometimes regret that I filled the circles so quickly.

I wish I had allowed them to remain empty for longer.

Not empty as in unfinished.

Empty as in complete.

A white disc against black.

A moon without a landscape.

A form containing no story, yet holding every possibility.

But the filled circles were necessary too.

They showed me what the circle could contain.

Only by filling it did I begin to understand the force of leaving it empty.

The ox entered the circle.

And later, the circle began to free itself from the ox.