Vienna Exhibition Opening Speech

Dear Japan Exhibition FotoSecession, Vienna, 18th October 2013 Opening text by Marjan Krebelj

My dear guests,

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first of all I would like to express my deepest apologies for not doing this show in German - I would sound way too incompetent for all of you nice people here - so English it is. I would like to thank you all for coming, it has been a great honor for me to accept the invitation of Ilona and Markus and prepare this exhibition and today’s evening.

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The works that I’m exhibiting are standing as last in a long chain of events. As early as I can remember into my childhood I was always deeply fascinated by Asian culture and their ways of thought. The quality that intrigued me as an average European was this completely different approach to storytelling and narrative, if there was any narrative at all. Most often it is just an atmosphere, a very calm but eternal moment of being, which up to this day I don’t fully understand.

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My story goes like this, after many years in photojournalism I got exhausted of just snapping random shots all over the place, I wanted to step up and go to conceptual - even more so - a staged photography, where you slowly build up a shot, much like movie makers make their movies. You write a script, draw a storyboard, find actors, props and locations and then you shoot.

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Out of that came the project Dear Japan. It all started with the photo which features a girl with a uniquely red hair, taken from above against the gray pavement. The color scheme and the composition a bit naively tries to imitate Japanese calligraphy. I played with that combination a bit more in months to come, but I knew that Japanese art is much much more than just combination of red, white and black. OK, today my story is a bit different - I would tell you that

this is the first chapter of the series, called Shodo, which corresponds to traditional Japanese calligraphy which indeed uses this color scheme, but to be quite honest, at that time I didn’t know very well what I was doing. On some intuitive level this kind of photography felt right to me and I wanted to pursue it further.

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Then the tradition of Sumi pulled me in with an irresistible momentum. The sumi paintings were almost never depictions of real landscapes - they were most often drawn from imagination of the artist with incredible skill. The brush strokes for this kind of work had to be practiced for years and a good sumi artist could render an enormous variety of gray tones by one single stroke. This technique has no room for error, once you pull the brush, it’s there. There is only one chance and one only to make it right and the mistakes are expensive - the rice paper on which this is usually done is scarce and very hard to produce, but so is the ink which takes days of careful preparation before it is ready to work with. The whole procedure is very contemplative one and while the artist prepares for the actual drawing, he meditates on matters of simplicity, beauty and peace‌

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These kind of sumi scrolls were used in houses and tea rooms to set up an atmosphere. At traditional tea ceremony one has to meditate in front of such scroll to prepare his soul for the drinking of tea. The landscapes and motifs are chosen according to the occasion - for instance in case of extremely hot weather, you might meditate with a winter landscape to cool off. Only after you calm your spirits with such meditation the tea ceremony can proceed to actual drinking of the tea. The whole process is very elaborated and perfected down to the last detail. Not a single move of a hand is waisted by the host nor the guest and it has to be practiced for months, if not years, to do it properly.

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Even within finished works I immediately recognized a few photographs with such quality and included them into this second chapter of the series, which I call Sumi.

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Then I started to shoot them in a more intentional manner and it was always a big pleasure to search for locations of very poetic, but not kitschy landscapes. I am just so fascinated by trees and their branches. To me a tree is one of the most profound things one can contemplate upon.

It is a perfect fractal - each branch resembles the whole tree and it is further divided into smaller branches. The shape of a tree is both ridiculously simple and profoundly complex. Each tree has its own unique form and size, yet you can quickly recognize an oak from a cherry tree. A tree is like a small universe and the pattern that these branches render on a 2-dimensional photograph is each time completely unique, chaotic and yet just so beautiful. There is only a limited way in which you can control a photograph, it is almost like a God’s hand is helping you complete the work. I can’t tell you how much I still enjoy shooting these Sumi pictures.

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I always try to include a model against the landscape. Human figure not only gives you a sense of scale, but also helps convey an emotion, it brings another level of sensuality and helps the viewer to project himself into the setting. But at the end of it all - the intention of these photographs is the same as with the traditional Sumi scrolls. These are - in a vulgar language tools for meditation. Visual haikus, if you may.

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Earlier this year I had a privilege to attend a lecture of one of the best Japanese architects, Atsushi Kitagawara, who made a nice walk trough the history of Japanese art and payed a huge attention to this sumi pannel painting by Hasegawa Tohaku.

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One of the things that he stressed was the incredible importance of what we would call a negative space - or what European eyes would see as an empty space - the space between the trees. This, however, is a wrong way to look at this work of art. What we perceive as empty paper is actually a space that is full - full of fog - a white darkness - which swallows the trees into the white abyss the same way darkness swallows trees into blackness. The essence of this kind of work is in the ‘empty’ space - the trees are there just to give you a sense of the fog that is between them. And once you get that, you realize, that the most important part of the painting is not being painted at all, it is completely blank paper, but yet you can feel the mass of the white fog. The power of the unspoken can be incredible - it is very Japanese way of thinking.

Once you realize that, the whole tradition of Sumi paintings becomes much more clear and suddenly your own mind starts perceive things differently.

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European tradition of art is very much concerned with action and drama, that is why we developed perspective drawing in the Renaissance - now your eye has a fixed point in space and time which is perfect for capturing the decisive moment of drama. But japanese art is not concerned with the particular, it rather goes the opposite way, it searches for the universality, for the moods and atmospheres, for the emotions which transcend time and space. This is why the Sumi landscapes have no need to depict actual places of Japanese countryside. It is actually for their own benefit that they are drawn from the imagination. Still there are many things I do not understand, but I pledge to learn and meditate.

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Sometimes it takes me a while to understand even my own work. Many times the work shapes you more than you shape the work you do. And this is particularly true in the case of the last chapter which I call The Black Paintings and which are the most difficult thing I ever done in my life. I am still not sure I understand fully what I did there, but I’ll do my best to explain it on an appropriate level.

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We mentioned darkness and shadows already. They play a crucial role in Japanese art and especially architecture. That was beautifully described by by Japanese author Junichiro Tanizaki in his book In Praise of Shadows, published originally in 1933 and which has since then became a cannon of Japanese architecture and aesthetics in general. It is often a book that a Japanese person will offer you as an introduction to their culture.

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In this book Tanizaki postulates that shadows are not an absence of light, as western people think of it, but actually a constructive element of space and architecture, in a way that is similar to the fog we saw a little earlier. A traditional Japanese architect will install shadows into a room almost like his western colleague will install lights or furniture and it is trough this very shadows that we experience transcendence and connection with the spiritual world. Two things happen; firstly in the absence of full vision our other senses sharpen, and secondly, our imagination starts filling in the details that are missing. Without any additional effort the space and the patterns become deeper, richer in detail and much more interesting to the eye. The sumi paintings get an entirely new dimension.

Almost everything can be experienced more fully in shadows; from food to theatre, but one thing that Tanizaki values the most is is gold. Gold shines in shadows like nothing else. It is only in partial light that gold gets its true beauty and character.

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If this is a bit to foreign a concept for you to understand, think of your childhood and all the monsters that lived in the shadows under your bed. There is nothing more mysterious than the imaginary world under your bed and gazing into that darkness is actually gazing into your own soul. Whatever your imagination fills in has been a part of you already. So looking into a darkness is looking into oneself in a very direct way. What Tanizaki doesn’t explicitly say is, (but it clearly is in his mind), that not only the evil monsters could inhabit the world of shadows, but there could as well be good spirits, if only you nurture them. Shadows will confront you with your fears and anxieties, and eventually you’ll make peace with yourself and become a better and more loving person. Remember; whatever you see in darkness is coming directly from the inside of you.

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At least on one level this was realized by European masters too. Rembrandt was a visual genius, almost a wizard who used shadows regularly to play with the viewers perception and letting him complete the picture. This soon became a fashion and later painters developed elaborated theories and practices how to achieve these effects. One of those was Delacroix who was particularly fond of combining and mixing complimentary colors to achieve great effect. “I can use a dark brown color and paint a naked blond girl in a way that she will still look snow white,” he said. “It is all about which colors you put around her”.

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This was picked up by Millet and especially van Gogh. Van Gogh loved and studied both Millet and Delacroix with zest and in a letter to his brother Theo on 2nd May 1885 he wrote about Millet: “His peasants seem to have been painted with the soil they sow.”

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And so do his Potato eaters. It was a conscious and elaborate choice, described in a number of his letters. In his deep affection towards night he pushed Delacroix’ color theory to the very limits. In another letter to Theo, dated 21st April 1885 (letter 495), which is a long essay on colors, he says something remarkable:

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“...one of the most beautiful things by the painters of this [19th] century has been the painting of DARKNESS that is still COLOR. ”

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At that time it was clear to Vincent, that black in itself is a useless color because it contains no information anymore, it is just black. If you want to tell a story of the night, you have to do it with the shades that are just above black - darkness that is still color. That was a very very important

manifesto even for my own digital workflow and I spent several weeks experimenting to achieve that darkness that is still color.

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But Van Gogh wasn’t the only one who was fascinated by the dark tones. Romantic period loved it and so Millet drew one of the first images of the Starry night, symbolist painters were also very fond of nocturnal moods and it is almost a rule for them to place their settings into the blue light, a short moment between day and night, when the mystery happens. James Abbot Whistler did an amazing series of nocturnes, which are among the most touching paintings ever painted.

Then you have composers like Schumann, Chopin and Schubert, all writing nocturnes for piano, Beethoven wrote his Moonlight Sonata, and there is almost no poet in the world who wouldn’t use the metaphor of night and stars at least once in his career. Chaikovsky’s Rusalka is singing to the moon and many others, like Belloini (Vaga luna che inargenti) do too, asking the all seeing moon - does she love me back?

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But to van Gogh stars play a role that is almost religious. He concludes his famous letter to Theo, dated July 10th 1888, with the following words:

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“Just as we take the train to go to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to go to a star. What’s certainly true in this argument is that while alive, we cannot go to a star, any more than once dead we’d be able to take the train. So it seems to me not impossible that cholera, the stone, consumption, cancer are celestial means of locomotion, just as steamboats, omnibuses and the railway are terrestrial ones.”

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And here is where we enter the realm of the worlds from beyond once more. If looking into the shadows is looking into oneself, then looking into the shadows is nothing less than practicing ones own death on a much smaller scale, because there is no greater confrontation with oneself than right before one dies and travels to stars. 


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Almost as he would predict what cosmologists and biologists later found out, that our body has the same list of the 5 most represented elements as the rest of our galaxy. Our solar system is built from the elements that were build in a core of a star which then exploded. We are literally built from the ashes of that star, and there we return after we die. In billions of years, another star might be born out of ashes of todays Solar system, a new life, perhaps. To Vincent, that is a moment to look forward to, and during my thinking about this subject I think I have identified at least three ways in which one can truly look forward of ones own death and the last chapter of Dear Japan series, The Black Paintings, is a visual essay on afterlife.

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Interestingly enough, these three ways of dying and going back to a star also correspond to three levels of afterlife, as described by Dante - Inferno, Purgatory and Paradiso, which also correspond to three levels of healing from a mental breakdown, which I think, the Divine Comedy is all about. Again this is not yet something I fully understand, but let’s give it a try.

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It all starts by living a sinful life, a life that is based on wrong assumptions, a life that has abandoned ways of love and creativity and took the vicious paths which lead to pain and suffering. Sometimes circumstances from outside play a huge role as well, an unfulfilled love, death of a loved one or financial fiascos, but we can survive all of that if the foundations of our living are solid enough. But if they are not, we brake. Often we later realize that it was actually us who not only composed this Infernal symphony but also conducted it, and trust me when one starts conducting such a piece, not only the orchestra, but also soloists appear out of nowhere and participate gladly.

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Negativity creates only more negativity until we collapse. Whatever Turner depicted in his shipwrecks, is not merely an accident at the sea. The sky is way to red for that - this is more a self portrait than a realistic account of a sinking ship.

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Dante wrote in 27th Canto of Paradiso, that when Christ suffered the most, heavenly paradise turned deep red.

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That color which at evening and at daybreak!

Paints clouds in sunlight from the far horizon!

I then saw cover over the whole heaven.! !

So Beatrice changed her looks, and such was once,!

As I believe, the eclipse in the sky!

At the hour when the highest Power suffered.!

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Caravaggio depicted the death of Virgin Mary, almost completely in red. 400 years later Mark Rothko repeated the same thing with his Seagram Murals - his deep red color today radiates inside the Tate museum like Plutonium inside a reactor. Even people who know little about art feel crumbs in their belly once they enter his room. Red is the color of pain and suffering, whether it is manifested directly or in a latent form (mixed with other colors), you still feel it in your stomach. For people who suffer like that, death means a relief of their pain.

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Oscar Wilde starts his essay (or letter) De Profundis with the following words:

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“Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain.”

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Deep in the darkest forests there still may be stars somewhere way above, but you don’t see them. You are turned with your back against them and completely blind for everything but your pain. You only see a reflection of your self and your suffering.

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But then, if you’re strong enough, you wake up, and you notice the stars at the end of a very long tunnel and this is how your healing begins. You take a boat and you pass the rivers of Acheront, just like once Dante did with Vergil, and you travel trough afterlife until you reach the mountains of Purgatory. Now it is time to climb and cleanse your soul of old and malicious beliefs, you need all of the fear, anger, self-pitty and pain, so you can make space for love and joy that is promised at the end.

And once you climb that mountain, stars suddenly seem at the reach of your hands. And then you look down the valley and all you can see is fog and darkness. Is this where I lived? Incredible regret and despair flood your heart. It is a very well demonstrated medical fact, that the rate of suicide among schizophrenics and people with depression does not so much correspond with the severity of their symptoms, as much as it corresponds with the number of times they climb out of their painful state. It is then when they realize what kind of a shithole their life normally is and they don’t want to go back there anymore. A person in a deep depressive state is usually too weak to handle such a difficult task as killing oneself is, it is during the healthier phases that you should be worried, in case you have a relative suffering from that. But relieving pain is still an Inferno way of dying.

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What is Purgatory anyway? In purgatory you don’t really suffer, but you are not particularly happy either. It is a place for the most people who work 8 hours per day, have 1.7 children, 1.3 pets, a monthly mortgage, summer vacation in Dalmatia and a Christmas dinner with their grandmother whom they hate for the rest of the year. In De Profundis Oscar Wilde also wrote:

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“A man whose desire is to be something separate from himself, to be a member of Parliament, or a successful grocer, or a prominent solicitor, or a judge, or something equally tedious,

invariably succeeds in being what he wants to be. That is his punishment. Those who want a mask have to wear it.”

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The right way to approach the mountain of Purgatory is to climb it, not to rest on the shores below it. You have to reject the pre-written, of the shelf scripts of life and find your own path. To work your whole adult life a boring and tedious job, so you can have a few years on your own, before they put you in a retirement home, is something a normal person could never sign up for, and the only purpose of formal education is to brainwash you so completely that at the age of 18 this actually seems like good choice to you. In short: you trade your soul and your personality for the comforts of simple regular life. You don’t suffer the way you would in hell, but you never reach your full potential either. It’s purgatory. Such people never do anything remotely interesting and they have every right to fear wrinkles and aging and finally death, because what they fear even more is LIFE!

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But one who does not fear to live can’t fear dying either. People who chose the path of selfrealization, which truly is full of risk, live chaotically, always on the edge, sometimes even beyond it, but they experience life in its entirety and have no fear of death because at the end of it, they know they Lived with a capital L. They realized their personality and once that is achieved there is no reason to pursue it further, the only noble thing left to be done is to make room for others to do the same. That is the way of the life since its creation.

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In that sense, you are not only fearless of death, you almost wish to die, but at the same time as late as possible because you want to have enough time to perfect your soul to the utmost brilliance. Or as Wilde puts it:

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“I hope to live long enough and to produce work of such a character that I shall be able at the end of my days to say, ‘Yes! this is just where the artistic life leads a man!’ ”

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But there are a few rare individuals among us who go even beyond that and reach full perfection of their soul. It took me many months of thinking to realize what that means and how death in terms of Paradiso can be not only a relief of suffering like in Inferno, not only a completion of a fully lived life as in Purgatory, but also an explosion of love and beauty. A very dear friend of mine tried to explain me this ideas one day when we went to the gallery together, but I didn’t get it. I needed more than half a year of my own struggle, a spiritual journey trough Flanders and all

the amazing people I’ve deeply connected with in Utrecht, Antwerp and Brussels, to fully grasp the concept of how beautiful and divine death can be in some really rare cases.

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Think of the following example: how would you react if I offered you a time traveling machine for you to meet your favorite music composer, say, Beethoven? Would you accept it? For a long time I thought I would, but now I am not so sure anymore. My impression of Beethoven is one of gentle soul that shines out of his magnificent music. If I actually went back in time, all I would see is an old and deaf guy, probably drunk and smelly, who would most likely shout at me for disturbing his reckless night walks. Nothing close to the perfection I have in mind when I listen to his Grosse fuga. When one develops such a soul, his body, no matter how beautiful, is still a mortal body with all its imperfections, and that body cannot compete with the beauty of his works anymore. You see, when you develop truly magnificent ideas, your physical existence is actually in a way of realizing them. They are so strong that they want to live a life of their own.

One of such ideas was an idea of unconditional love and kindness by Jesus Christ, but above all his rock solid moral standards. It doesn’t matter if you are a Christian or not, I myself lean towards the atheist camp, but you have to be a fan of his morals. When he said “Turn the other cheek”, he didn’t mean be a pussy and let them take advantage of you - what he meant was: if it comes to the point when you have to choose between enduring an other punch or punching back, turn the other cheek! Your cheek will eventually heal, but once you let your morals go, you are no better than them. Getting another punch is a small price to be payed for defending such a great thing as moral authority is. This is only a small fraction of his great idea and preachers will say that he sacrificed himself for humanity, for you - the sinner, which is not false, but not entirely true either. It is twisting of the words for political reasons of Catholic church, to make people feel a little guilty so they can be controlled more readily. But even without that agenda, it still misses the point; Jesus didn’t sacrifice himself so much for the humanity (nor for your soul) as much as he sacrificed his BODY (which is perishable anyway), for his IDEA of love and kindness. Not only that - he had to make his death as huge a spectacle as he possibly could, to reach as many people as possible. And to make sure of that, he had to piss off not only the Romans but also the Jews and anybody that came in his way. The more they tortured him, the more he smiled, because he knew that with every stone they threw at him, he was closer to spreading his idea. Whether Jesus is just a fictional character from the book called The Bible or an actual person who lived around year Zero, you have to admit his death was the biggest PR event in the history of human race and boy it worked!

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You don’t have to look far to find more examples of such love. On 20th April 1986 Vladimir Horowitz, a Jewish-Russian pianist came back home to play a concert in Moscow after 60 years of exile from the communist system and almost equal amount of years of reoccurring depression episodes, the longest one being in 70s (I think) when he couldn’t touch the piano for almost 10 years. When he played in Moscow that night, people who were not lucky enough to get the tickets, gathered in masses around the performance building and stood there in silence in Russian cold night, even they could not hear a note of the concert, but they were there just because they knew that Horowitz was inside. Horowitz doesn’t have to collect any money for charity for the poor people of Moscow, his personality is enough an inspiration that people decide to help themselves rather than wait for others to help them. In that sense, developing

your personality and working on yourself can be the most moral thing to do, because when one the develops such a great artistic personality, one radiates love and inspiration, even trough the thickest walls of Moscow buildings. It is the highest form of love I can think of right now. There might be higher, but I don’t know I about it.

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The erotic love, which is many times so praised by poets, is an inferior to the love to that that Jesus had in mind. Erotic love is very conditional, it fuels from attention, and there is never enough of it, so it quickly becomes viciously possessive and aggressive, it gives birth to jealousy and with that suffering once more. That is why it is associated with the red color again. Milan Kundera, Oscar Wilde and even Michael Crichton wrote a lot about it. But the love of Jesus is

unconditional and non selective. It is also very robust, once you love like that, no one can hurt you anymore, because you now have an incredible capacity, an enormous imagination so to speak, to understand anyone at any given time. In fact, it can be even anti-fragile1 - the more

they try to hurt you, the more you understand them and the further more you develop ability to love even deeper.

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“What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me.” (van Gogh)

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At that point you start transcending your trivial bodily life with something much more beautiful, because despite all, life indeed is grand and its beauty goes far beyond death and pain, just as Horowitz’ music or van Gogh’s paintings do. Ugly art is hence not only pathetic but also highly immoral for it propagates self-pity, which poisons the soul in the Inferno way, and that leads to suffering once more. It is a revolt against life. It doesn’t inspire people to strive for anything more than mere biological existence. But then again, even the great Art has to come from deep below, from the depths of hell trough the mountains of purgatory and finally the heavens above, otherwise it is pure shallow kitsch, a decoration for calendars at best. For people who achieve this level of beauty, the material existence is no longer relevant and to them there is no point to fear or even to delay death, because their souls are granted immortality in the collective consciousness of the whole human race. From the day when this became clear to me on, my goal became to dedicate my life to such beauty, such way of love and such kindness that these giants we mentioned today had in their hearts. Life is too precious a gift to be wasted on anything less than that.

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Thank you for your attention and enjoy the exhibition. !

Q.E.D. 1

The term was coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book Antifragile. The simplest explanation of the subject goes like this; imagine a box with glasses inside; the more you shake it, the worse it gets, hence it is fragile. If the box was really super well built, it could be robust (to some point). But imagine now a box that actually gains from shocks. That would be anti-fragile - something that gains from volatility and disorder.