The white monochrome frame is an image that speaks to the impossibility of the empty image. —Herman Asselberghs

In Zen philosophy nothingness is an essential part of everything that exists. Nothingness, according to the Japanese Zen scholar Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki, “is the negation of all qualities, a state of absolute non-ness” (Suzuki, 1956). At first glance, nothingness, emptiness, and visual stillness seem to constitute Zen for Film. These concepts are bound up, on the one hand, with the 1960s–70s avant-garde strategies of negation and, on the other, with Zen’s ascetic withdrawal from the richness of visual representation. The idea of nothingness belongs to the core of Asian philosophy, notably Buddhism and Daoism, but it has also occupied Western philosophy, prominently in the philosophical projects of Martin Heidegger and Jean Paul Sartre. In Western painting, voids and a certain visual austerity superseded styles marked by excess and abundance. In the 1960s, the Japanese aesthetic of stillness became increasingly attractive to Westerners, as did Zen, which disdains abundance in favor of simplicity.

The somewhat negative associations with death, absence, disappearance, and deficiency familiar in traditional Western culture are viewed differently in an Eastern context. In the Daoist and Buddhist mindset, nothingness becomes a fertile source inherent in everything that exists. The Heart Sutra, a popular Buddhist scripture, proclaims: “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” By encouraging viewers to engage with Zen for Film, Paik deliberately asks them to empty their minds and allow an awareness of nothingness to arise. This process, if successful, may bring about another form of consciousness and sensitization in the beholder. As John Cage put it, “Art is everywhere; it’s only seeing which stops now and then” (Lewallen, 2001). —AG