Ryoanji (龍安寺, The Temple of the Dragon at Peace) is a Zen temple located in Kyoto, Japan. The Ryoanji garden is considered the grail of kare-sansui ("dry landscape"), a type of Japanese Zen temple garden. Kare-sansui features distinctive larger rock formations arranged amidst a sweep of smooth pebbles raked into patterns that facilitate meditation.
Given the reality of physics, rearrangements of Ryoanji is not feasible. John Cage composed his Ryonaji with chance, pencil and paper. In 1982, when Cage was commissioned to design the cover for a book to be published by Editions Ryôan-ji, he developed a process of chance-controlled creation, consulting the coin oracle of the I Ching and later computer-generating randomized numbers, reducing the subjective aspects of both composition and performance.
Here, artist Jimi Wen recomposes Ryoanji exploring the limits and boundaries of generative art. Instead of rearranging the stones, which he fixed, everything else is by way of chance. Every aspect of this piece - the original physical walls, imaginary walls, p5js raked sands, trees beyond the walls, and including the visions we see with our mind not our eyes, elicit a form of meditation on screen.
Like any work of art, the artistic garden of Ryōan-ji is also open to interpretation into possible meanings. Different theories have been put forward about what the garden is supposed to represent. Garden historian Gunter Nitschke wrote: "The garden at Ryōan-ji does not symbolize anything, or more precisely, to avoid any misunderstanding, the garden of Ryōan-ji does not symbolize, nor does it have the value of reproducing a natural beauty that one can find in the real or imaginary world. I consider it to be an abstract composition of objects in space, a composition whose function is to incite “meditation”.
In the science journal Nature, Gert van Tonder and Michael Lyons analyze the rock garden by generating a model of shape analysis. Using this model, they showed that the empty space of the garden is implicitly structured, and is aligned with the temple's architecture, where the axis of symmetry passes close to the center of the main hall. The implicit structure of the garden is designed to appeal to the viewer's unconscious visual sensitivity to axial-symmetry skeletons of stimulus shapes.
