Art is usually considered mainly from the point of view of form. Depending on the particular painting, we say its style is either impressionistic, abstract, baroque, naive, classic, and so on. After that, one’s attention goes towards the name of the particular artist, the time the painting was made, etc. Even if we receive some kind of energy while in front of a painting that we see in a gallery or museum, we are almost never aware of it. On the contrary, as soon as we see Supreme Matriarch Ji Kwang Dae Poep Sa Nim’s paintings we are made completely aware of the energy they have and relay to us.

From the point of view of form, we may consider that her paintings belong to the naive art style because of the directness with which their initial meaning is transmitted. In these paintings we see, for example, a lion as a lion, an elephant as an elephant, a smiling face as a smiling face. Right away we are brought to simplicity through her precise technique that washes away any obstacles between the painting and the viewer. We immediately discover the beauty there and we also feel that the artist strongly wants to make us comfortable. We immediately feel at ease. Next, we understand that the form and color of the painting are not the main thing but are an open door (reinforced by the golden calligraphies) through which energy flows.

This is why it is impossible to talk about the artwork of Supreme Matriarch Ji Kwang Dae Poep Sa Nim without talking about the energy they transmit. It is impossible to talk appropriately about that energy without having a certain level of spiritual realization. Nevertheless, that we can enjoy and be benefited by their energy is most important. This is the main purpose of Her paintings. We could even say that they are practical art because in addition to enjoying them from the artistic point of view, the energy of the place and person who owns one changes and everything begins to work correctly. This is due to the clarity and truth from which these paintings are created. We must not forget that Supreme Matriarch Ji Kwang Dae Poep Sa Nim is a fully enlightened great spiritual master.

The paintings of Ji Kwang Dae Poep Sa Nim are holy and sacred. They all transmit clear spiritual messages right into our homes. She uses Her artwork as a means to help and benefit others and to express to the world that attaining true happiness and peace are really possible. Her Spiritual Energy Writing Paintings are alive and show us these things.

This new level of the art has been needed for a long time. It has finally arrived. Thank you very much Supreme Matriarch Ji Kwang Dae Poep Sa Nim!

It is not that the Energy Spiritual Writing Paintings show their subject in a special manner by combining western pictorialism with eastern calligraphy. Rather, they incorporate their subjects. What they show is materialized and gives the viewer a fresh imagination through the bright colors of the painted image. The meticulous traces of the brushstrokes carry the energy of the hands by which they are drawn, which are the hands of Supreme Matriarch Ji Kwang Dae Poep Sa Nim. That is why Her paintings, with all their different and varied subjects, are energy paintings in addition to being artistic paintings. They transmit their energy directly.

Changes that one can feel directly occur not only where our paintings hang but throughout our home. Even people who do not know anything about the origin of the paintings or Supreme Matriach Ji Kwang Dae Poep Sa Nim can feel the special energy that surrounds and emerges from the paintings. This sounds like magic and in a sense it is. I cannot explain scientifically how the process of sending energy through the paintings works, but I can describe the effect, since we have experienced it clearly for some years now and we have had several crucial experiences with other people (and now even animals) who stayed in our house.

Some guests like to lay down on the floor directly in front of the paintings. They choose those places for a short nap even though they are not physically the most comfortable places for resting. Our sofa, for example, would be more comfortable. When some people who work with us in our house arrive they are at times very tired and tight. However, when they leave they are more refreshed than before, even though they worked for some hours. One time a worker who was looking for water lines under our house was immediately impressed by the “high voltage energy” that flows out from the paintings. He said that the energy of the paintings is so pure and strong and that all possible atmospherical interferences are equalized.

The title of each painting says what it is for and what the person(s) who have it will be or what they will receive. What the title expresses will come true. This is not something one has to believe in, but is something one will experience.

Thank you very much Dae Poep Sa Nim.

The paintings of Ji Kwang Dae Poep Sa Nim, the Supreme Matriarch of the Lotus Sangha of World Social Buddhism, embody distinct patterns of relating that are healing and illuminating. They are paintings that, through their presence and our attention to them, directly change the meaning of things. Put another way, they are not static works of art, the same for everyone in every situation, but artistic events that allow things to work for the benefit of those fortunate enough to encounter and enjoy them.

Most artists paint in order to express themselves or to make a statement about some aspect of the world that they feel deserves the attention of others. Especially in contemporary art, there is often a conscious attempt to do so in ways that raise questions about the meaning and history of art, as well as about the viewer’s relationship to them. Such works of art, even though they may be abstract, surreal, or highly conceptual, still serve to represent some understanding or experience of the artist. They place something before the viewer who must then take in, decode, and understand its message. In postmodern language, most works of art function as signs. In a common phrase from Zen Buddhism, they are “like fingers pointing at the moon”.

Of course, this is nothing new. Especially in the West, art works have long been understood as symbolic in nature. And, indeed, it was for this reason, nearly 2,500 years ago, that Plato dismissed the art of painting as irrelevant or misleading for those intent on realizing truth and beauty. With the irony so characteristic of postmodern life, this is a claim that has come to be embraced by many artists today who see art as a way of explicitly challenging the meaning of “truth” and “beauty” and even “meaning” itself.

The paintings of Ji Kwang Dae Poep Sa Nim have their roots in a very different tradition. Although it is possible to see her paintings as evocative of primitivist, impressionist, and even surrealist sensibilities, they seem to me to have greater affinity with the East Asian traditions of calligraphy, landscape painting, and the practices associated with sacred icons and mandala or meditative devices.

From earliest times in China, and later in both Korea and Japan, writing was associated with mediating between the human realm and that of the sacred or spiritual. Writing was not originally for the purpose of mundane communication, but served to bring about community between the celestial and the human through the manifestation of shared meaning. In part, this is why calligraphy came to be regarded as the preeminent form of art in East Asia. Calligraphy was understood to be a direct demonstration of spiritual force and virtue a demonstration of a person’s profound capacity for harmonizing with their situation, but also for bringing about harmony within a situation. For this reason, all great leaders in East Asia have traditionally been expected to demonstrate calligraphic skill.

In East Asian calligraphy, the written word becomes a vehicle for bringing into direct presence both transformative energy and insight. The calligraphic work is thus not an artistic representation of a particular word with a particular meaning. It is the live recording of performative realization occurring in a specific place, at a specific time.

This sensibility came to inform the canons of Chinese landscape painting in the Tang and Sung dynasties. Influenced by both Buddhism and Daoism, landscape painters strove to so fully and clearly relate to the natural scenes they painted that the energy (or qi) of the mountains, streams, valleys, trees, and rocks would literally be recorded on silk with ink. Instead of resting primarily on representational skill, masterful landscape painting was understood as arising through an artist’s ability to establish clear and open sympathetic resonance (ganying) with nature. The importance cannot be overstated of sympathetic resonance in traditional Chinese culture – in correlative cosmology, medicine, theories of governance, and social harmony, for instance. But it was also crucial to Chinese understandings of religion and the efficacy of sacred art and ritual.

Sacred art in East Asia generally served two interwoven purposes. As evident in Buddhism, the first was to embody or make present spiritually significant figures, the most common of these being particular Buddhas or bodhisattvas who had vowed to help all those who would call upon them in sincere need. The second purpose was to provide a vehicle for meditative training and a means for realizing attentive virtuosity (known in Buddhism as samadhi) and wisdom.

The paintings of Ji Kwang Dae Poep Sa Nim bring together all three of these East Asian artistic tradition and extend them in a way that is, to my knowledge, utterly unique. To begin with, although Her paintings are often figurative, in the strict sense of the word, they do not represent anything. They do not place before us an image of something. They are not signs or indications of something lying beyond the canvas in the usual sense. To shift metaphors, these paintings are not like recipes. They are feasts – orchestrated by a master chef – into which we can enter and actually taste the meaning of true virtuosity and wisdom. Ji Kwang Dae Poep Sa Nim’s paintings place before us live recordings of Her own attentive mastery, great compassion, and unlimited capacity for skillfully unblocking relational patterns that have become conducive to suffering.

In this sense, although the paintings are in many cases explicitly figurative, their function is not to represent some individual person(s), some ideal, or some archetypal relationship. Instead they serve to actively restore the originally pure and clear meaning of the relationships through which we have come to be as we are. They are vehicles for healing and illuminating patterns of sympathetic resonance.

The characters ji and kwang can be translated as the “effulgence of wisdom” or “brilliantly shining realization”. The paintings of Ji Kwang Dae Poep Sa Nim, the Supreme Matriarch of the Yun Hwa Denomination of World Social Buddhism, allow Ji Kwang – effulgent wisdom – to enter our own lives and do there the healing and compassionate work of transforming this world into a Buddha-realm in which all things may do the great work of enlightenment.

Peter Hershock, Ph.D.

Honolulu, U.S.A