Three Videos from the Canine Monk series (2007)
One Black/One White (2001)
By Bill Arning
Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Walking my dog through Central Square in Cambridge, I met a homeless woman who gestured toward my dog and said, "They are a path to God, you know." When I looked puzzled, she reiterated as if speaking to a slow child: "Dogs are a path to God.” What could I say but "Thanks for the reminder”?
Like a modern Aesop, the Taiwanese artist Hung-Chih Peng invites us to consider human behavior and spiritual aspiration through four recent works featuring dogs. In One Black/One White (2001) dogs act out the human foible of envy to their own detriment. In the Canine Monk series (2007) they write beautiful Zen Buddhist and Daoist meditations and protective charms with their tongues. As they perform the role of human surrogates in these works, they remain dogs and relate to one another, the world, and to spiritual realities as dogs do.
The bond between humans and dogs exists in most cultures and goes back to the Upper Paleolithic Age (14,000 to 17,000 years ago, the earliest period of human history. Dogs played a role in early man's first conceptualizations of a spiritual world. Many of the concepts that positively or negatively affect spiritual progress such as purity, presentness, and uncontrolled desire, are conspicuous in dogs, and canines may serve as paradigms-both good and bad-for human behavior.
Although in Islam dogs are considered unclean, some versions of the life of the Prophet Mohammed contend that he had a dog companion, Saluki.(1) The Egyptians revered dogs-although less than cats-and canines were often mummified to accompany them in the afterlife. Homer wrote that upon returning to Ithaca in disguise, Odysseus was recognized first by his elderly dog, Argus, who has served as an icon of loyalty over time.(2) The Monks of New Skete, who live closely with their German Shepherds in their upstate New York monastery as a spiritual discipline, are considered to be among the greatest dog trainers in the west.(3)
However, artist Hung-Chih Peng has found inspiration for his recent work in Buddhist Dharma study. In a famous Zen Koan given to initiates trying to understand the complex irrationality of Zen thought, a student asks the master Joshu, "Do dogs have Buddha nature?" Joshu says "Mu" which translates as "No thing In Mumon's commentary on this Koan to say either "yes" or "no" would have resulted in a loss of one's own Buddha nature.(4) Hung-Chih Peng's works also offer little commentary on how we should understand his Canine Monks; he just asks that we contemplate them.
One Black/One White (2001)
Single Channel DVD
2 min. 44 sec.
In One Black/One White, two dogs are too busy coveting each other's dish to barely manage to eat their own bowls of food. The dogs are from the same litter, and their visible difference-black and white-while marked, is essentially inconsequential. Dogs are free from envy and do not compare their lot to others, except when what they want is visible, or close at hand. In the transparent shamelessness of their quest for more food they may still have a leg up on humans, who will act out in seemingly incomprehensible ways when feeling short-changed.
Excerpts from the Canine Monk series (2007)
In three works from his ongoing Canine Monk series, Hung-Chih Peng employs the simple, yet effective strategy of writing texts on white walls using a paste of dog food, filming as his dogs lick it off, then projecting the footage backwards, creating the appearance that the dogs are writing the texts with their tongues. He changes the speed of the playback to create rhythmic and formal effects, but does little else to disguise his obvious manipulations-they lick the hardest where the writing is densest—as the resonance of the works is not based on our believing the dogs are in fact authors or sources of these wise texts. Their passionate gourmandizing reveals that they have not freed themselves from the endless cycle of desire that prevents enlightenment in humans. Like fables, these fictions mirror human attempts to consume spirituality.
Qingjing Jing (2004)
Single Channel DVD
19 min. 38 sec.
This text, the Qingjing Jing is the classic foundational meditation and devotional chant of Taoism, referred to as the Scripture of Purity and Transformation. It is intended to focus the mind on the balances of nature while serving as an aid to overcoming desire. It was believed to have been written by the priest, credited with founding Taoism, Lao-Tzu in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) and was formulated as a liturgy in the Song Dynasty (960-1260).(5)
The Heart Sutra (2005)
Single Channel DVD
14 min. 20 sec.
The Heart Sutra is the simplest and most common Sutra for Buddhist Dharma study, part of the Perfection of Wisdom literature of Mahayana Buddhism. As it is more compact than many Sutras, it is often chanted, in an attempt to comprehend the fundamental emptiness of existence. The Sutra is somewhat unusual in that the Buddha did not speak it. The text appears in Sanskrit, the language in which the Heart Sutra was first written.
Excerpts from the Taoist Protective Talismans (2006)
Five Channel HD video
6 min. 49 sec.
(formatted as a single channel projection for The Media Test Wall)
Hung-Chih Peng's most recent work, Excerpts from the Taoist Protective Talismans, is a multi-frame simultaneous image of the artist's dog writing protective talismans. These are a form of magic—one is a "Spell of Prevention for Dog Barks and Bites," and another expels the mischievous spirits of deceased dogs and cats. The artist has left them untranslated so that we might better enjoy the rhythm of the simultaneous motion of his dog's head swaying as she "writes" and eats.
(1) Stanley Coren, The Intelligence of Dogs (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), 56-57.
(2) Katherine M. Rogers. First Friend: A History of Dogs and Humans (New York: St. Martins Press, 2005), 31.
(3) The Monks of New Skete, How To Be Your Dog's Best Friend (London, Little Brown and Co., 2002), 10-12.
(4) Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki eds. Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Texts (Boston; Rutland, VT; Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 1998), 115-116.
(5) Livia Kohn, The Taoist Experience: An Anthology (Albany, NY: SUNY Press,
1993), 12.