My practice—painting night after night, revisiting similar scenes—is a Sisyphean labour. As Camus writes, “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart” (Camus, 1955: 123). Accepting repetition and acknowledging inevitable difficulty become ways to generate meaning. Each seemingly identical night scene carries subtle emotional variation; every return to the canvas is a new interpretation of eternal recurrence.

 

This approach echoes the Daoist idea of wu wei—“non-action that allows everything to be done” (Tao Te Ching, ch. 37). It is not passive withdrawal but an active letting-be, allowing the landscape to reveal its own essence. In Chinese literati painting, artists such as Ni Zan and Bada Shanren used emptiness and restraint to create fullness of spirit. Such “progress through retreat” takes on new political meaning today: to paint unpeopled landscapes, to choose silence, is itself a response to a noisy world. As Sontag reminds us, “Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech” (Sontag, 1969: 11).