Opening the Eye Mind

With Kyoun Sokuzan, Abbot of the Sokukoji Buddhist Temple Monastery

 This special addition to the Art and Meditation series at the GRAM introduces a teaching on art and meditative awareness, developed by Kyoun Sokuzan, Buddhist priest and founding teacher of Sokukoji Buddhist Temple Monastery. Sokuzan teaches this practice in museums worldwide, and comes to the GRAM on the heels of a recent session at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and other East Coast museums. 

On Saturday, January 18, Sokuzan will teach four half hour sessions of OTEM throughout the day, at the Grand Rapids Art Museum. Please watch the GRAM website for the schedule, or drop in any time on the 18th to attend one or all of these sessions. No registration required, and the GRAM fee for the day is $5.

“As artists or observers, when we come into a museum or gallery of paintings, sculpture, visual displays, or other creations of artists who have made and put together images and objects, we are often not really open to what is there.  Instead, we lug our preconceptions, opinions, and other conceptual biases with us.  Of course, some of our ideas, our training as artists, our point of view can be valuable.  But when they take the place of, or get in the way of, direct perception—the visual experience itself—then our world is compromised, and we miss the incredible power, force, emotions, and even delicacy of this visual dimension.

 “Opening the Eye Mind practices guide the artist/observer in seeing for oneself what visual experience and relationships are made of from a subjective viewpoint.  With that, these practices can bring freedom to create new forms and images without the constraint of preconceptions or fear of failure and to hold a new perspective on what it is to learn from—and trust in—one’s own perceptions.  These exercises can aid in minimizing old ego-driven modes of accomplishment that depend on outside approval and the need to be “right” as well as beginning to have unconditional confidence in oneself and others.  Although these practices focus on the visual awareness, then ban also be applied to any of the senses, including thinking).”

~Kyoun Sokuzan