Zen Garden

Argentine artist Fabián Bercic’s highly synthetic and shiny Zen Garden recalls the cuteness (kawaii) of Japanese product design or Anime and is miles away from the sober restraint and venerable tradition of oriental gardening. Though he is commenting on the loss of values and commercialization of culture, Bercic’s work is not simply an opposition between an idealized past and an imperfect present. He is reminding us that we can only look to the past through a contemporary lens. Through this installation, Bercic questions how we can create a meaningful, functioning Zen garden today out of the materials and context of our twenty-first century capitalist society. Bercic’s process is to lose himself in a repetitious and ultimately invisible activity that recalls the raking of gravel by monks in the original Japanese Zen gardens. Despite appearing mass-produced, Zen Garden is the result of months of painstaking manual labor that achieves the appearance of an industrial object. Here, Bercic wishes to draw attention to contemporary issues of labor and product. By undergoing such a laborious process, his approach slows down the breakneck speed of today’s anonymous system of industrial production and reintroduces the human element in the way things are made and used and in their subject matter. While the artificial materials Bercic uses seem at odds with our perception of a garden as made of organic materials, his work reduces natural forms to their most abstract and pure representations, becoming ‘natural’ in their content rather than their external form.