Experience of Zen: Bernice Bing with Saburo Hasegawa

Later in her career, Bernice Bing stated that Saburo Hasegawa (1906-1957), one of her teachers at the California College of Arts and Crafts, was the catalyst for her awareness of her Asian heritage. Hasegawa was a prominent art critic and artist in Japan who advocated the affinity and synthesis of Japanese artistic tradition and Western modern art, and was enthusiastically embraced by the Cold War period American intellectuals who were interested in alternative ways of thinking. On the other hand, Bing's actual encounter with Hasegawa was quite brief, and her stylistic choices or pictorial elements were not distinctively related to Asian art.

As an American artist of Chinese descent who was born in San Francisco's Chinatown, Bing is often discussed in the context of Asian American art. Nevertheless, examining how and what of Hasegawa's philosophy materialized in Bing's practice is a critical task to avoid carelessly attributing the artist's Asian identity to her expressions.

This paper investigates Bernice Bing’s unique interpretation of Asian aesthetics, through which the artist attempted to realize "a strange kind of dual vision that the eye and the mind can comprehend at the same time when looking at the painting." To grasp the underlying thread of Bing's creative imagination, the discussion reflects on the spiritual aspects of Zen landscape painting by Sesshu, which Hasegawa greatly admired, with particular emphasis on Bing’s visionary landscape paintings from the 1970s.