Exploring Art's Impermanence: A Journey Through Museum

Visiting an art museum would bring me overwhelming sadness, as each floor of the museum requires so many lifetimes to create its exhibits. Many artisans spend countless days and nights crafting a single objectsuch as wedding attire or something elseand then it is only worn once before being discarded. The value of handmade crafts may lie in the accumulation of human time. What we see here are objects, but behind them lies a living soul, a long struggle, a useless entity that constantly reminds me of my inability to comprehend its meaning. Although I dont know what its trying to convey, its very presence feels intrusive and discordant.

I had previously read a novel by Japanese author Takashi Tometi called Flowers and Birds in Dream, in which the protagonist creates art throughout his life, questioning whether his work is merely a backdrop to his existence. The painter lives and paints, unaware of whether painting is a reflection of his life or vice versa. He paints like a painter, living in a sparse, open space reminiscent of a bamboo forest. Painters, writers, calligraphers all seem to be waiting for time to age them away. While I watched my fellow students at the museum, they were absorbed and silent, yet I felt no real engagement with their work either.

The museum has an eerie presence that makes me realize how short human life is compared to art’s claim of immortality. Is art really a defense mechanism against the passage of time? Another extreme view is that music exists only for an instant before it fades away, even if we tried to preserve it in time itself. Writing seems like a form of rewriting time so that we might resist its flow. But perhaps music is more aligned with human impermanence than writing is.

In Kishiga no Moris Golden Pavilion, the author reflects on the impermanence of both art and humanity:

“How could something so beautiful, like a sound produced by a wooden flute with an awkward X-shaped leg, be different from other beautiful sounds? I think it must come down to mastery. Beauty is mastery after all. Just as a wooden flute with an awkward X-shaped leg can produce a clear, bright sound, I, too, could achieve this level of perfection through practice and hard work. This idea gave me the courage to keep going. However, another thought came into my mind: The beautiful melody of The Caravan from The Source was so enchanting even with its gloomy tone that it must owe its charm to its X-shaped leg. As I learned more about the flutes nature and its maker, I began to understand why he disliked eternal beauty.”

As I delved deeper into Moris thoughts, I realized that his wooden flute could not last foreverit was a fleeting sound like a fragile creature. Yet his mastery of this impermanence was what made the music so beautiful. The temporary nature of music is unlike any other art form, but it was no less meaningful than the impermanence of human life itself.

The passage concludes that “the very essence of beauty lies in impermanence.” For Mori, music was not merely an escape from the world; it was a creation that captured the fleeting nature of existence. The musician had spent so much time perfecting his craft that even death would not erase its value. His beautiful melody, however, could never sustain life itselfonly his mastery of impermanence remained intact.