No Man 2017

 

Installed a few meters from Old Man, No-man takes the form of a log lifted on steel rods, a hybrid structure that oscillates between bench, animal abstraction, and nameless figure. Its horizontal surface invites use: to sit, to pause, to dwell. Yet the work refuses to be fixed in a singular role—when occupied, it becomes an extension of the sitter’s body; when empty, it lingers as an indeterminate presence. In this way, the sculpture is never complete in itself but perpetually shaped by relation.The title invokes the fourth and final sight that set Siddhartha Gautama on his path to awakening: the renunciant, one who abandons worldly identities in pursuit of liberation. No-man echoes this gesture of self-emptying, offering itself not as an individual form but as a vessel of potential. It is a body without a self, open to transformation by whoever engages with it. In sitting upon it, one does not simply rest but participates in the work’s becoming—occupying anonymity as possibility.Viewed in dialogue with Old Man, No Man establishes a subtle theatre of perception. From the bench, the viewer can observe the condensation, sediment, and slow oxidation of Old Man unfold, making visible the temporality of matter. This spatial relation invites a meditative state: one sits in stillness (the renunciant), while watching another body (the old man) dissolve in time. Within this pairing lies an echo of Japanese aesthetics: ma, the interval that holds meaning in the space between, and mu, the nothingness that is not absence but openness. Together, the two works create a constellation of impermanence and potential, staging the paradox that to be no one is, in fact, to be infinitely available.