Q&A about the new sculptor Kuan Yin

[Maya Hill]

[Maya Hill]

Q&A With Maya Hill, Sculptor And Creator Of Forms Of The Feminine Spirit

Q: So why did you decide to sculpt Kuan Yin, the Chinese Goddess of compassion?

Compassion is like death, Christ consciousness, sexuality or some other fundamental life experience every serious artist ought to tackle and find his or her expression at some point. Maybe the war in Iraq was part of it. Then, I became a citizen last year. I am an American now and this process also set the timing for me to find my definition for compassion.

Q: What does Kuan Yin mean to you?
      
In China, Kuan Yin’s name means, “she who harkens to the cries of the world.” She wants to hear. She has the capacity to receive all that pain and suffering. Now that’s an image to contemplate! Furthermore Kuan Yin never was born as a goddess or some supernatural deity. She was a woman like you and I who after her enlightenment vowed to stay connected within the worldly realm and only to depart after the very last creature in this world has also become enlightened.

My interpretation of this living incarnation is about developing her as an aspect of ourselves. A quality possible and natural to all human beings. With this understanding I started sculpting.

Q: What does your Kuan Yin look like?

The hands and arms are central to man’s symbolic ability to shape and embrace life consciously and to participate in the creative or destructive powers. The chest and heart area, the connecting space between the arms is a dominant feature in this Kuan Yin. You will see it as a rather big part of the figurine. It is said in many different traditions that “miracles” happen in response to a need bigger than the ego. It means that with a sincere longing from the heart and therefore in service of a vital human need, a creative strength
inside yourself will find resonance with the world and how life is taking shape around you. It’s like the law of attraction, if you really want something, live it, think it, be it, and that vibration will come to you. 

Her arms are outstretched down into the earthly realms and up into the heavenly realms. Like the Yin Yang symbol, the positive and the negative, she has the ability to hold both, our inner and our outer world. She holds duality. This implies that there are two, including the observer and the observed. Kuan Yin is well aware of her place in life. Her connection between heaven and earth is solid. Her creative presence is in the dimension of human relationships, emotional involvement and our need for belonging. 

Q: What does compassion look like when it is expressed in our lives and the world?

Our first development of compassion shows in our response to an immediate need for protection and help. All of us would pick up a lost puppy from a dangerous street. We would be happy to go out of our way to care for the little fellow until he is back in safety. We will gladly help someone in need and give our spare change and much more. There are so many ways to be compassionate. Maybe you have noticed that the traditional Kuan Yins are very regal and beautifully serene. None of them is in immediate action. Remember the pictures of Mother Teresa kneeling in the street caressing a dying persons head? I deeply love the immense beauty of such an image. It brings tears of joy to my eyes.

My approach is a different one. Since compassion is an inherent quality in all of us, how do we develop it? How do we bring it into our daily life as a way of being, a starting point? How can compassion be a way of being, beyond the goodness of doing it when needed?

I have come to places in my life where all the reasoning and all the defending did not bring a solution to the pain. I know the times where all of my efforts, money and even prayers did not bring relief to the suffering. I know the helpless agony of not being able to do anything for so many atrocious unbelievable injustices going on at any moment of our day. We all know this feeling in our hearts. So if the doing cannot do much, what is left?

My sculpture is about being. This Kuan Yin has developed the capacity to hold the tension of the opposites without the need to move to one or the other side. Acceptance is the key in doing so and acceptance does not mean to excuse or endorse. It is more about the recognition that something is part of our human reality. As soon as we judge or take sides we exclude it from acceptance and can
no longer hold it in the range of all there is. It is a challenge to stay in the heart space of recognition and acceptance without judgment.

Q: It sounds hard. How do you resolve the contradictions?

I do not think there is resolution between holding these opposites of inner contradictions. It is not possible to find compatibility or resolve between hate and love, between our arrogance and our modesty, between our sense for beauty and generosity and our desire for malice and revenge. The space that holds in between the two has to exist without judgment, without reason, without explanation. This is why we have to give this ability over into the spiritual realm. We can no longer explain it. Compassion on that level might really have to include the deeper creative forces of our existence. This capacity evolves out of a trust of something bigger than ourselves. 

Q: You give me a lot to think about.

Thinking will not bring you much result, but maybe it will stir something in you. Acceptance is more an activity of the heart. You cannot mentally find a resolution. That’s what my sculpture is all about – once you bring thought to that heart space, you have division, and you are no longer accepting anymore. Kuan Yin does not analyze. She holds the tension without doing anything about it, without trying to save it, resolve it, make it go away, sedate it. There is no resolution, solution or answer. We have to trust.

Q: Do you know what your next piece might be?

As I said earlier I became a citizen a few months ago. I have started on my new project. It will be: Liberty!

When I’m creating a project, my whole life organizes around that concept. I live it, research it, and discover what thinkers and philosophers said. Then I try to find out what it means for me. It may never be done, it may take me years. I’ve been working on a relationship piece for a long time, without finding an image that represents me. Liberty needs a huge overhaul. The old, historical definitions do not encompass the complexities of our new world.

Q: That sounds like a big project. What kinds of questions are you asking?
One of the beautiful things about living in America is the freedom to develop our individuality. At the same time we have to learn what it means to maintain
healthy boundaries. There are so many misinterpretations right now of what healthy boundaries means – we are a country with solid frontiers, but at the same time, the world has become so connected with the internet, and our knowledge of each other – the world has become flat, as Thomas Friedman puts it so well.

You know, cancer is a misunderstanding of healthy boundaries at a cellular level. Our many compulsive behaviors, substance abuses; these seem like expressions of freedom, but are actually misinterpretations of liberty. The idea of liberty has to be newly defined. I don’t have the answers right now – these are my questions. If I discover an understanding, you will see a sculpture!

[Author]

Posts