Aesthetic experiences open up spaces

It’s getting harder. The pressure is too high; inner spaces are shrinking. And yet, here I am with a small group of Chinese executives at the newly opened h+Art Museum in Suzhou. A building designed by Tadao Ando and an exhibition that, in many places, explores the themes of human loneliness and a sense of being lost. Not through words, but through an aesthetic visual experience.

It takes quite a while – in a room with paintings and installations by Yang Fudong, the experience begins to take hold of the first participants – in resonance, they sense their own sense of loss, become aware of themselves and cautiously open up an inner space that they had shut away under the pressure of ceaseless busyness.

Throughout the exhibition, a spiritual dimension is repeatedly evoked in relation to nature. The participants engage with this, seeking their own sense of meaning. They breathe more deeply. They feel a sense of emptiness and longing as they engage with the artworks within the light-filled, spacious architecture. In their conversations, they open up to one another. A shared aesthetic experience in which they gain inner space and a little more freedom in their feelings and thoughts.

It does not change the system of never-ending pressure in their working lives, but it does offer the freedom, for this moment at least, to look at their own reality with a sense of relief. At the very latest when they look again at Anselm Kiefer’s: Dat rosa melts … they experience the constraints and loss of self within their own lived reality. Aesthetic experiences open up spaces for thought and feeling. They have consequences.