Autumn 2023
Our father would sometimes reference Chinese herbal formulas in his artwork, a visualization of ingredients that in their synergy attain a specific power to heal. Eight Treasures, one of the paintings we highlight for this Autumn, is an example. The painting portrays a well-known Chinese herbal formula with eight ingredients to fortify one’s qi and blood or, to quote a current vendor whose phrasing made me smile, it enhances your “life juice.”
The visual of the Eight Treasures painting is tied to many of my memories of our father’s acupuncture clinic in Washington, D.C., where it hung on the walls. Patients and visitors like myself would sit in the waiting area and contemplate (perhaps without realizing it) the colors and textures interacting with each other, a parallel to the relationship the ingredients of the formula have to each other; the painting as a whole a parallel to the artful science of the formula as a whole.
And it was this parallel of art to medicine that our father was exploring…in this instance, was there a way to translate the healing properties of Eight Treasures into a sensory experience through our eyes, asking the question: in contemplating the painting were we not also fortifying our qi and enhancing our life juice?