“Reality” is a subtle concept. An artist creates an artefact, a fact, a reality through the skillful convergence of other facts. Those other references and earlier, representational facts were similarly composed of other, earlier facts. This is how our minds (and cultures) endlessly rebuild this world. In this way – we often mistake the discrete, bounded artefacts with which we are presented as being the reality of this world when it is the immaterial abstraction and the matrix of interdependence and representational cross-reference between them which is the true reality. This is Buddhist no-mind.

Art by Qiaoming Mi, painting.