Lord Yama (kentama)

Lord Yama (kentama)

2017, Oil on linen

54 x 73 cm

Happy Year of the Dog!  It is the first day of the lunar calendar year today.  As a child in Hong Kong, this first day of the new year was the day when we all had to dress up in new clothes, always with some red, and go visit the few relatives we had in the territory—my mom’s uncle, her cousins, which usually meant that we had to leave the confines of Clear Water Bay, go into the city (to visit her cousins, one in Kowloon, the other on the Island) and then trek even further out into the New Territories, walk up a hilly path, to her uncle’s century’s old village farm home. It all involved a lot of boredom really, apart from getting the little red envelopes of money, and endless supply of dried pumpkin seeds and sweets, one had to sit through long conversations between the adults in their once a year get together, and not make too much noise.

Walking up to my grand-uncle’s old farm house in the New Territories, I often noticed, apart from all the trash (the last day of the year is reserved for throwing out the old and bringing in the new, so a lot of trash was left on the sidewalk, sort of like a New Year’s Welcome, take my junk moment) there were statues of the female incarnation of Buddha, Guanyin, as well as this diabolical looking military male figure, Lord Yama, that were worshiped by the villagers, fixed solidly in altars by the entrance of the homes, curls of incense smoke heavily perfuming the air during the long climb up to the old house on the hill.  For a child of a protestant preacher, this menacing figure was all sorts of extreme and sinister.

Lord Yama, or King Yama, to be more precise, that diabolical looking military male figure, is not an exact equivalent of the Satan/Lucifer/the Devil of Christian tradition.  He is more Hades than a fallen archangel.  This is an excerpt from Wikipedia:

“In Chinese mythology, King Yan (Chinese: t 閻王, s 阎王, p Yánwáng) is the god of death and the ruler of Diyu, overseeing the "Ten Kings of Hell". He is also known as Yanluo (t 閻羅王, s 阎罗王, p Yánluówáng), a transcription of the Sanskrit for King Yama (यम राज, Yama Rājā). In both ancient and modern times, Yan is portrayed as a large man with a scowling red face, bulging eyes, and a long beard. He wears traditional robes and a judge's cap or a crown which bears the character for "king" (王). He typically appears on Chinese hell money in the position reserved for political figures on regular currency.”

Working to complete pieces for “Bonjour Monsieur Indigo” and while reading Antoine Volodine’s Bardo or not Bardo, I had started painting “Lord Yama (kentama)” prior to going on a trip to Philadelphia last Fall.  While strolling through the East Asian collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I ran into a 15th century Ming Dynasty ink rubbing of a stele:

Memorial Stele of Wang Zhen

Tianshun Period (1457 - 1464)

Rubbing of ink on paper

(Image courtesy of the PMA’s website; see link above)

I was quite struck by the ghost image that was achieved from the ink rubbing.  The positive-negative inversion from the stone to the paper felt  like a very good example, a metaphor, if you will, of the binary state of being present and absent, you know, the clichés of life being a fulfillment of the presence of death, and death being the eternal absence of material life.  Anyway, if Lord Yama was to be represented, then instead of being a real physical figurine in all its materiality, perhaps he should be like an ink rubbing, the reversal of positive representation, the negative of presence.

In its final state, my Lord Yama is simply staring out from the canvas and inscribed next to his apparition is the phrase “kentama,” or "It is finished" in Wardwesān (Frédéric Werst's invented language).   The importance of the change in language and context for the phrase is not anecdotal.  If the Lord of the Underworld were to speak a language, wouldn’t it be one that doesn’t depend on anything but pure imagination, a language, as it were, that came out of the blue?  And wouldn’t his final verdict to all who go before him not be one of the hope of salvation, but the ever sure presence of the coming eternal absence?   You be the judge.