My mind sometimes wanders. Under normal circumstances, humans perceive the external world through several distinct "sensory channels". Vision is one such channel: raw images captured by the eyes are processed in specialised regions of the brain to generate varied sensations — size, form, colour, and even time‑space. Yet you cannot hear thunder visually at the very moment you see lightning. To perceive sound, you must rely on hearing, another of humanity’s sensory channels. Sound is processed exclusively by the auditory system. Human auditory discrimination is enormously complex, and audio signals are likewise handled by dedicated parts of the brain. By the same logic, seeing lightning and hearing thunder tell us nothing about taste. To know what lightning tastes like, you would have to taste it directly — perhaps it would taste spicy‑numbing.
Past experience can trigger virtual sensory responses. Suppose you had once tasted lightning, whether salty or hot‑spicy. That memory would be stored somewhere in your brain. Later, upon seeing lightning or hearing thunder, you might virtually sense saltiness or that sharp spicy flavour.
This remains nothing more than a simulated sensation!
Vision, hearing, taste and other tactile senses all arise from activity within discrete brain regions; they do not intermingle. What if these human sensory channels could merge, or build bridges to share and exchange information among one another? Imagine vision capable of tasting flavours and registering sound. Imagine the tongue perceiving the beauty of music and the brilliance of colour, and ears doing the same. Technically this is not inconceivable. If realised, such extraordinary power would be truly marvellous.
“Mike and the others sat motionless on the cold floor.
It was a medium‑sized room ordinarily used for thematic painting exhibitions. Lee’s painting hung on the wall. Mike hugged his knees. An elderly woman wept silently. A young boy lay prone on the ground, glaring furiously at the artwork. A middle‑aged woman nodded faintly with a look of bliss. A plump fair‑skinned boy stretched out his hand as if trying to grasp something. All sat perfectly still.
Though their expressions differed, Takahiro could sense a shared inner tranquillity emanating from them. The painting held their gaze and soothed their agitated souls.”
Excerpted from Museum Planet by Kan Hiroe, translated by Ding Dingchong.
This passage describes a mental state beyond verbal communication, a state triggered in the brain in response to visual imagery. It embodies a transcendent condition in which vision virtually perceives sound. For this reason, I believe that for any visual artwork, it is the image itself that acts upon the brain, not supplementary information. One frequently observes this in museums: tour guides recount at length the narratives behind paintings, artists’ biographies and contextual anecdotes, while exactly what we ought to perceive directly from forms and images gets overlooked. Meanwhile, many artists increasingly allow narrative and conceptual frameworks to drive their creative practice.
How then do we interpret abstract art built solely upon dots, lines, planes, colour and texture? These works employ no figurative devices and contain no dramatic plotlines. Within abstract painting, only the frame is physically tangible. We may distinguish different hues, yet there is no story to unpack. Perhaps this signals an era to which we ought to return. We need to reclaim our brain’s innate capacity for processing visual forms. When engaging with art centred on visual language, we should honour our immediate mental responses. Lines may evoke time; colour may signify space‑time; dots might represent the past, present or future. Those white speckled marks give rise to a sense of rhythmic pulse. The composition unfolds slowly before our eyes, and rhythm carries music from quiet calm toward crescendo. Perhaps one day we will break free from isolated sensory channels and transcend ordinary reality.
Zhu Wei
