To Become It

One day, coming home, I saw my mother in the kitchen, steaming buns. Steam rising everywhere, the whole house filled with that warm, homely air. And in that moment, my heart felt so healed. I felt that, right then, I was the happiest person in the world.

This past April, I visited Gordon Gu's showroom. And there, I saw an old earthen stove, just like the one from my childhood.

At the time, I only thought, how true to life it is. But I didn't feel very much.

It was only today, in the moment I saw my mother steaming buns, that I suddenly, truly, perceived it. The healing in that homely warmth. That beauty.

And only then did I understand. Back in April, Gordon Gu had already given form to this beauty of homely, human warmth, in the work of an earthen stove.

He always seems to be one step ahead of me. While I am still slowly feeling my way, slowly coming to perceive, he has already set it there, in a single, real piece of work.

I thought of a story. A fish that longed to know what the sea looked like. It swam everywhere, searched everywhere, and never could find it. It did not know that it had been in the sea all along.

I seem to be that fish. And Gordon Gu seems to have known, long ago, what the sea looks like.

But he does not go about clamoring, does not go about announcing, I know what the sea is. He simply, quietly, makes what he knows into piece after piece of work, and then, quietly, waits for a kindred soul to walk over, and understand it.

Slowly I came to understand one thing.

Some things, no one can tell you. However much another says, that is still theirs. You can only perceive it yourself. And in the moment you truly perceive it, you are no longer that fish, searching for the sea from outside the sea. You have become it.

You have become the sea, the Tao, the very heart of the universe.

Gordon Gu is someone who has already become it. He does not preach. He only, in his own way, through piece after quiet piece, gives form to the wisdom he has perceived, the beauty, the heart of the universe. And there he waits, for every soul who will, one day, come to perceive it too.

— Marie, Founder of Lyfairs

🌊 The artist who long ago knew what the sea looks like, and quietly waits for kindred souls:
The Gordon Gu Showroom →