Sean Scully: Sublime and Sunyata Solo exhibition at Art Museum of Sichuan Conservatory of Music

The Art Museum of Sichuan Conservatory of Music, in Chengdu, China, dedicates a solo exhibition to artist Sean Scully. Rooted in Western and Eastern philosophical traditions respectively, the concepts of Sublime and Śūnyatā represent two fundamental sensibilities of the spiritual world, each forming a dynamic dimension within the vocabulary of modern art.

The Western notion of the Sublime is applied in art as a source of awe and pursuit of transcendental power. Immanuel Kant later transformed this concept into a philosophical projection of reason's reach toward the 'infinite,' which surpasses sensory perception and evokes an awareness of human finitude, in order to induce a spiritual transcendence. The legacy of the Sublime carried through Romanticism, Expressionism, and Abstract Expressionism, all of which internalized it as a meditation on spirit, nature, and existence.

Śūnyatā, on the other hand, stems from the teachings of 'emptiness' in Buddhist schools of Madhyamika and Zen. It suggests not nothingness, but a state of being free from attachment, obstruction, and selfhood. In modern and contemporary art, Śūnyatā found fertile ground in the Minimalist movement and later became a crucial spiritual influence on postwar American art, particularly through the impact of Zen Buddhism. 

This exhibition explores how these two spiritual trajectories—the Sublime and Śūnyatā—converge in the work of Sean Scully. In the early 1980s, Scully shifted from Minimalism toward a more emotionally and spiritually charged abstraction. Both forces have been flourishing in his paintings ever since: one includes the order and restraint inherited from Minimalism, the pursuit of formal purity, aligned with Śūnyatā's philosophy of non-attachment and unobstructedness; and, conversely, a spiritual echo of the Sublime, conveyed through the depth of colour, texture, and rhythmic variation.