My reflections on exhibitions—and the way they affect me—often only surface after a stretch of time, as if there were a kind of temporal stickiness at work.
Some of Richter’s squeegee paintings are partially wiped away after completion, even deliberately abraded. This struck me suddenly on the flight back to the United States, so sharply that my temples throbbed, setting off a chain of associations:
1.
Wounds—wounds produced by friction. Perhaps a knee scraped against rough rock, or artificial turf; perhaps fingers rubbed repeatedly against an arm, until dirt, skin, and flesh blur together. A whole shallow layer of epidermis is worn away; beneath it, the skin begins to bead with blood, which then congeals into a red-yellow scab.
How many times have I had such wounds? Countless—and with time, the number can only increase, even if the frequency declines with age. Not only because people become less physically reckless as they grow older, but also because adults increasingly prefer long trousers, progressing from sweatpants to jeans to slacks.
If the scab is torn open again, blood beads once more. It flows downward, filling the hollow the scab had occupied, on its way to becoming a new scab.
Why do shallow wounds deepen as they heal? Why must abrasions that did not hurt at first temporarily worsen during recovery?
2.
Ink shoots out from the tip of a pen. Even though I did not see the moment it burst forth, the pink down jacket in front of me was undeniably stained blue-black.
I fell into a childlike panic and began trying to wipe away the ink I had blown out of a gel pen refill. Circle after circle, the ink spread, becoming a larger and larger blot. On the pink jacket it resembled the head of a cobra—vicious, poisonous. My hand pressed harder and harder, yet all I could do was watch the situation deteriorate; even the fabric of the jacket seemed close to being rubbed through.
My fear was not of future reproach, nor of guilt toward the victim. It was the terror of an unforeseen mistake—one my immature mind could not absorb, could not properly assess in terms of severity or responsibility. Everything became unforgivable, irreversible.
3.
A Raketa watch is ordinary, cheap, with a daily deviation of up to five minutes. If worn and used seriously, it would probably add many amusements to life—and even more trouble.
Even so, mediocrity does not fully confine a person or an object. On the morning the Prague Spring began, it was photographed by Koudelka and thus entered the realm of legend. Under that glow, its many shortcomings turn into virtues, enough to push a poor person like me into immediate purchase: I bought the exact same model.
The watch shipped from Ukraine, drifting for a month and a half through a war zone before reaching my hands safely—perhaps that is why it feels rough, like a traveler. Holding it, weighing it, handling it, I was at first dissatisfied with its quality, but eventually accepted it as a product of the Soviet era.
Still, what I could not tolerate was the black speck hiding under the crystal, at the edge of the six o’clock marker. I couldn’t tell whether it was a dent or a stain. I pried off the plastic cover and tested the spot with my fingernail. The probing was difficult: the movements were so small that even the tremor from my heartbeat caused panic, making the entire process feel like a struggle.
Over time, this pointless labor felt increasingly pointless. Losing patience, I began rubbing the area with my whole fingertip, trying to erase it.
How was I to know that the surface texture was not metal? It was metallic paint, brushed outward in even strokes from the center of the dial. Under the friction of skin and nail, it unraveled like violin strings scraped by a blade—spreading, twisting, and finally dispersing entirely, leaving behind a white, textureless dial.
A large wound appeared on the watch’s face—pure, even pristine. I couldn’t help wondering: now that the damage was done and the texture irretrievable, should I wipe the entire dial clean, making it more unified, more minimal?
In the end, I couldn’t decide. The perfection I was chasing seemed merely to replace the watch’s original existence with a single, total wound, rather than reconstruct its identity. And if I did nothing further, the wound would inevitably remain, as a trace of time and anxiety.
I wonder whether Richter hesitated in the same way when he rubbed away his own paintings.
4.
The beginning of last summer found me wandering alone in Tokyo. Although the opulence of Ginza was dazzling, the objects that most stirred my love of material things had long since been locked away in museums. Among them, lacquerware was my favorite.
Layers of lacquer in different colors are applied, air-dried, repeated, then polished and carved, producing twisted, dimensional textures. When these patterns appear on objects already elegant in form, they become utterly mesmerizing—I felt there was nothing in the world more suitable for a bedside table.
Unlike Fontana’s violent slashing of the canvas, Richter destroys paint layer by layer through erasure, using wear—a slower, more torturous process—to express a fuller sense of time. When we consider the thickness of a work—yes, even oil paintings that present themselves as two-dimensional ultimately possess a three-dimensional physicality—the souls sleeping lightly beneath layers of pigment are awakened through abrasion. Yet in which layer they hide, or whether they truly possess souls at all, is something neither Richter nor I can say for certain.
5.
My upper right front tooth suffered damage early on—given its age, it resembles a youth academy player who tears an ACL before ever reaching the top league.
I still remember the dentist’s blue gloves gripping the tweezers, scraping repeatedly across my incisor as he explained its condition.
“I don’t want to remove the cavity from the back,” he said. “Your back teeth are thick—good teeth. This cavity is closer to the front, so we should drill from the front, preserving the healthy tooth behind.”
After the drilling, a small patch of unnaturally white material appeared on the front of my tooth. In the weeks that followed, I constantly tested its hardness with my finger, trying to pry open the uneven boundary between filling and tooth.
What is it that we truly care about—the loss of essence, or the correction of appearance? And if the difference is merely one of quantity, where exactly is the line between the two? My teeth have trapped me in these questions ever since.
If erasure and abrasion are forms of correction—corrections based on destruction—then why doesn’t Richter begin erasing his works from the back of the canvas, working from a three-dimensional perspective, polishing the work itself to produce varying degrees of transparency?