Deng ming dao biography channel

The Force of Creativity

Creativity is my most natural way of living. It is the way I interact with this world.

I can still remember the moment—I must have been nine years old—when I realized that drawing was a state of mind that involved me completely. It was a clear, calm, and welcome source of knowing. The experience was the feeling of a mystery understood. Creativity was a force that was immediately present and lasted as long as I wanted.

Drawing blends concentrated seeing, intense mental involvement, and action through hand, arm, and my entire body. I have to first observe fully to draw well. Then I have to commit completely to line, shading, and color. After that, there is the question of composition, because it isn’t enough simply to render something: there also has to be a meaningful arrangement of elements within the edges of the page. Composition takes observed details and assembles them into a larger whole. As the drawing takes shape, there is a further process of discovery and a series of adjustments. There is the seizing of serendipitous moments and improvisation to compensate for accidents. Balance becomes just as important as depiction.

There are no mistakes in art. The artist’s task is to uncover the full nature of art, identifying the essence of what he or she wishes to make a life’s work. One can’t get to the next piece of art without full involvement in and completion of the current one. An artist may finish a piece, be dissatisfied, and vow to make the next one better, but acceptance and analysis must come before moving on. The piece we are working on is the piece we must make at that time.

There are many things that have changed as I’ve aged. I can’t draw the same way I did when I was younger. My sensibilities have changed too. I’m not interested in the same things—having exhausted explorations of those topics—and my hand probably moves differently. What doesn’t change, though, is feeling the creative force. No matter what happens in my life, it is always there.

I’ve made my career as an artist, a published writer, and a book designer. However, the constant feeling and sheer thrill of creativity that began with drawing is what really leads me to continue. From boyhood explorations to professional discoveries decades later, I will be an artist all my life.

Growing Up in a Studio

I grew up in a studio. My mother, Jade Snow Wong, was a potter, enamellist, and author. My father, Woodrow Ong, was a silversmith, potter, and metal spinner, making the forms my mother enameled. I learned metal spinning as well. For many years, my father and I supplied all the copper forms for my mother’s work.

The home I knew as a boy was a loft, long before loft living was popular, and the studio below was filled with equipment and materials quite different from what other children saw at home. There were three gas-fired kilns, two for pottery and one for enameling, a potter’s wheel, a long workbench for applying enamels to copper, jar upon jar of enamels, many crocks of glazes, and bins with the raw chemicals to make more glazes. Along with toys, I played with kiln shelves and supports, metal stands, tools of all sorts, and fistfuls of clay. On the floor below was metal-working equipment: an enormous lathe, a hydraulic press, metal shears large enough to cut a thirty-six-inch sheet of copper in one stroke, a circle cutter, and a buffer. Machines back then were huge and heavy, made with real cast-iron parts and machine steel. These were machines of an industrial age that has now been supplanted by a digital one.

Throughout my childhood, I could try to make anything I could imagine out of the metal, clay, and wood that surrounded me. Making things was natural as I was growing up: my mother and father designed the forms that they enameled, my mother improvised on the potter’s wheel, and my father might make a needed tool or repurpose an old machine. The copper forms made on the lathe required a wooden template carved out of rock maple. The copper itself came in enormous sheets, mirror smooth, reflecting our faces and hands as we worked it. Creativity and discovery were two intertwined processes throughout my childhood.

I also learned that creativity required thorough preparation; any skipped step could lead to the ruin of the piece later. For example, my mother showed me how the first step of throwing pottery, wedging the clay, could mean the success or failure of the piece days later in the kiln: carelessly trapped air bubbles might cause the pot to shatter.

Even with the right preparation, there could be disappointment. A pot would explode in the firing. A copper bowl would fly off the lathe. Any piece left in the kiln too long would warp, or its glaze might burn off. Failure, though, led to recycling. Copper and scrap metal were sold back to a dealer. A clay bowl that was not right when it was thrown was put into a barrel of water to dissolve into new clay. Destruction was part of creation.

I learned to throw pottery, stack a kiln, and glaze the pottery. I learned to spin metal, and for years I took over the task of spinning the bowls my mother enameled. It was a common thing to be told upon coming home from school to make ten bowls, or fifty trays, or a hundred dishes. After the bowls and dishes were enameled, I learned to clean them in sulfuric acid and polish them on a buffer. I polished my mother’s enamels until her last ones—a span of about forty years.

My mother once said to me that she counted some thirteen possible points in the creation of a piece of pottery where something could go wrong. From the first shaping of the wet clay to the final removal from the kiln, there were many moments when disaster could occur. She also said, “Handwork always takes more time.” Being an artist meant constant work, acceptance of disaster, joy in a good result, and acceptance that the process was not completely predictable.

My Childhood Neighborhood

The neighborhood around my parents’ studio was once the notorious Barbary Coast area of San Francisco, famous as a red-light district and home to flophouses for drunken seafarers. The ships that hundreds took to the 1849 gold rush docked in that area. Men abandoned the ships, the ships became silted in, and finally a fire destroyed them all. Buildings were raised over the buried ruins. Eventually, the area evolved into Jackson Square.

Many unusual people came to visit my parents. A cormorant fisherman from Japan stayed with us for a short time, bringing all his birds! Each morning, he found shining fish to feed each of them, showing me how they were not wearing the rings that went around their necks. Cormorants were used in Japan to catch fish. They accompanied fishermen on boats and dove into the water to catch the fish in their beaks. The rings around their necks allowed them to breathe and drink, but not to swallow the fish, which they returned to the fishermen.

The sculptor Benjamin Bufano was another visitor. He liked my mother’s enamels, and the rounded forms and color echoed his own sculptures of people and animals. Many of the visitors were quite eccentric. One such person was the calligrapher Li Li-Ta, who told my parents: “When the common people say that they do not understand my art, I am delighted. When the common person says that they like my art, I tremble.”

Even the paper that I had for my early drawing consisted of leftovers from the Grabhorn Press. The Grabhorns were friends of my parents and kept me constantly supplied with what I now know to have been acid-free rag paper, perhaps some of it quite rare, just for my scribblings. One summer, I went to their press to make a linocut and to set type, and the memory of being there is one of my touchstones when I design books.

I’ve sketched this brief glimpse of my childhood to emphasize that I came from an environment where creativity, innovation, making things oneself, and making a living through the arts were inherent. From my parents, their friends, and my neighborhood, I learned that looking, touching, and making things with my hands could indeed be ways of living.

The Intervention of a Teacher

Having teachers and mentors was also important, and there was one teacher who made a difference early on. My fourth-grade teacher, Miss Aramian, noticed that there were two boys who showed promise as artists. She frequently sat George and me together, and one Saturday she took only the two of us to the de Young Museum.

I had been there before—though I was most interested in the swords, armor, and tank—but it may well have been George’s first time. I can remember her taking us into a gallery, showing us the painting St. John the Baptist by El Greco, and talking to us seriously about it. We glanced at it and wanted to turn away, but she insisted we stay, study it, and talk to her about it. Did we notice the colors? The stormy sky? The way El Greco elongated his figures? This was neither accident nor clumsiness, she assured us, but an intentional part of his style.

The painting frightened me. The extra examination that came with the discussion meant a deeper but initially unwelcome involvement with it. On reflection, it showed that art could affect people profoundly, and that a painting could communicate deep feelings that could not be put into words.

Miss Aramian helped awaken something in me. In hindsight, one might say that my parents’ involvement in the arts and living in a studio would have led me to art anyway, but the kindness this teacher showed me made a great difference. From that point on, art became even more important to me.

Taking My Artist’s Name

By the seventh grade, I knew that I wanted to be an artist, and I pursued that goal as much as possible. I also discovered that others in middle school did not know what career they wanted, and especially that few people were interested in art. What happened for me with complete constancy was frustrating and confusing for others. Being an artist meant having an ability few people had. That also meant being an outsider.

Sometime during my high school years, I told my mother that I wanted to be a professional artist. She looked at me sadly and said, “You’ll never be rich.” But she did not oppose the idea. It was also at that time that I decided to use my given Chinese name, Deng Ming-Dao, as my artist’s name.

I liked my name. It tied me to my family, because my paternal grandfather had selected “Ming” and my maternal grandfather had paired that with “Tao.” For a while after I started using the name professionally, I felt that it was both a curse and a blessing.

It’s hard for non-Chinese people (which means most people I meet) to remember, and it makes it hard to be seen as anything but Chinese—even though I’m American-born. But the name is a reminder, too, of how names can seem to foretell one’s fate. I didn’t know it growing up, but eventually I would have a career writing about the Tao that is my name. That wasn’t out of conscious striving, but when I look back, it seems to have been predestined. Now I have accepted it, in the same way that one doesn’t really have a choice but to accept who one is, and I realize that the name binds everything about me together.

Deng is my surname. Ming means “bright, light, clear, evident, understand, know.” Tao means “movement, path, way, means, doctrine.” It is the root of the name of one of China’s great spiritual traditions, Taoism. Since 1983, I have been known internationally as an author who writes about the Tao.

How could two grandfathers, one a gambler and hard drinker, the other a garment factory owner and Methodist lay minister, come together to give me a name that would foreshadow a career writing about China’s only indigenous religious tradition? And writing about it in English and in the United States, far from the homeland from which both of them had immigrated? There’s no way to answer that question directly—only to say that the search for that understanding is in itself a kind of tao.

Finding Taoism

Finding Taoism involved another process of discovery and searching. It began when I found three intriguing books on my mother’s bookshelf: Manual of Zen Buddhism, by D. T. Suzuki; Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China, by Arthur Waley; and The Way of Life, Lao Tzu: A New Translation of the Tao Te Ching, by R. B. Blakney. Both Zen and Taoism fascinated me. As mysterious and strange as Zen’s reputation is, even today, Taoism seemed to be stranger still: it seemed to underlie all of Chinese history, from the sorcerers in the court of Qin Shihuang, the First Emperor of China, to the beliefs of innumerable artists, musicians, and poets. What was this religious tradition that seemed contrary to all of Chinese culture, that advocated wild nonconformity where my Confucian Chinese school teachers advocated strict morality and conventionality, and that laughed at the piety of Buddhism?

It didn’t occur to us to see our names as anything grand or advantageous. Deng Ming-Dao was just what I was called in Chinese school, mostly as the prelude to a dreaded command to recite lessons or to be scolded for my behavior. Besides, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to connect the lofty Tao that was the underpinning of thousands of years of culture with myself, a boy with patches on his pants struggling to get through the droning lessons of Chinese-language school each night. We were made to memorize poetic lessons of the deepest quality, even as we were told that we were ordinary and dumb children who could not possibly comprehend the deep profundity of the sages. The most we could expect was to get some dull inkling decades later, or to have our morality shaped—as if the words were some sort of enchantment. One teacher would tease us before a test: “If you haven’t studied, you ought to take your books home and boil them in water and drink the soup. Maybe then you’ll pass the examination.” It wasn’t for some years that I finally realized that the Tao I read about was also the name I had been given.

Looking Further for Taoism

I undertook what would become an ongoing study of the Tao and Taoism. I’ve read as many books as I could find relevant over the course of decades. I’ve studied arts allied to Taoism: martial arts, herbalism, calligraphy, painting, meditation, poetry, music, qigong, feng shui, mathematics, the Chinese classics, literature, and history. Repeatedly, the leaders in these fields keep pointing back to the Tao. Repeatedly, the Taoists assert that any one of these seemingly adjunct fields will lead to the Tao as surely as scriptural study. I went further. At one time, I went to the appearances of every visiting Taoist, Buddhist, lama, and yogi. I traveled to China to visit different sites and to see how Taoism existed today.

One might think that the easiest step would be to go to a Taoist temple. But the Taoism practiced in Chinese communities today is not the Taoism that interests me. This is Taoism as a folk religion, a Taoism of colorful altars, chanting of scriptures, burning of incense, kneeling with offerings, and contacting the gods through divination and spirit mediums.

The contrast between ongoing American life and following the Tao is ever present. Native-born Chinese will see that I am a different person than their contemporaries. Non-Chinese Americans may see that I have access—and obligations—to traditions that are unknown to them. I am a third-generation Chinese American artist who follows his own tao of being an artist as deeply as possible.

This life is a path that I walk, from birth to death. It is a path of suffering and joys, knowledge and mystery, accomplishments and failures. It is a path of work, of striving, of struggle, but it is one where these seemingly sorrowful things can lead to open vistas of peace and understanding. It is a path where there will always be support and good fortune for those who seek it and work for it, and it is a path where one can find acceptance and even comfort. It is a path of skill and action, devotion and supplication; one uses the ultimate of mind, body, and spirit to discern and then follow it. It is this path, this Tao, this living way that I follow. My path is an artist’s path. The creative force that I feel surging in me is the Tao itself.

The Dialogue with Tradition in Art and Spiritual Practice

Both art and spiritual practice are dialogues with history. One has to know both traditions in order to first appreciate each of them, to practice them, and then to add to them. Otherwise, practice is arbitrary and unconnected with what has gone before. There have been so many extraordinary accomplishments by past masters from which to learn.

Appreciating art seems to be a widely misunderstood endeavor. Many people go to museums and galleries because they want to know more about art. However, appreciating what one is seeing requires a long exploration of art history. A person steeped in art who looks at a painting sees dozens of references and comparisons to other pieces of art. The skilled viewer holds in mind all of art history from around the globe. In every piece, there are references, allusions, and perhaps a witty or shocking departure from what has come before. Unless one internalizes all this, involvement in art is incomplete.

On Formalism and the Question of Spiritual Art

Art as I learned it in college, as it was practiced by professional artists from the late 1800s to the end of the twentieth century, and as it is defined within the paradigm of museums, is marked by formalism. It is art in dialogue with itself, marked by ideas as opposed to mere appearances and resemblances, and in search of the nature of pure art. Minimalism, for example, asked what the most basic form of art could be. In painting, it was color and form. Therefore a perfectly red canvas made sense: the shape of the art was identical to the shape of the canvas—it was not a picture of something but the thing itself. It had no lines to divide it, nothing that might seek to be an illusion of anything other than what it was. It was wholly what it was. Conceptual art took that further: the art object wasn’t necessary, only the idea itself. As long as the viewer understood what the artist was communicating, why use an object?

In formalism, any context, content, representation, or realism is superfluous, even an interference to accessing the purely visual. Everything that one needs to understand a piece should be right there; historical context, extraneous reasons for making the art, and, obviously, more mundane concerns such as interior decoration or social concerns were completely jettisoned.

Yet when one looks deeper, artists have been celebrated precisely for bringing external concerns and outside elements into art. Andy Warhol and other Pop artists incorporated references to popular culture: the package design in Warhol’s Campbell Soup Cans, the comic-book enlargements of Roy Lichtenstein, the references to news and mass-media photography of Robert Rauschenberg. One can argue that the collages of Picasso and Braque were the very importation of real objects and materials into the dimension of art.

African American, Latino, and Asian American art was allowed, even expected, to touch on themes related to community life, even as the established art world refused to put any of that art on a par with its canonical works. The art historians may look for influences of mainstream art on ethnic American artists, but they don’t search for ethnic influences on mainstream artists.

Anselm Kiefer has been heralded for his examination of postwar Germany. Manga (Japanese comics) have made museum appearances. Gerhard Richter questions the meaning and appearances of photographs. Everywhere, “external” concerns have come back into art, where we once sought the purest art free from extraneous motivations. It’s clear we don’t currently have “art for art’s sake” in our culture. We allow art with all sorts of motivations. It would make sense, then, that there could be spiritual art.

There is a problem here, though. We feel ambivalent about spirituality, and therefore even more ambivalent about spiritual art. There are a number of reasons for this. We seem to accept art that is subversive, irreverent, witty, or outrageous. We want our art to be independent, and we avoid art that is part of the established society. For example, we don’t esteem art that is in the service of the government as highly as art that is independent. We don’t celebrate official portraits, for example, as high art. Likewise, civic commissions rarely take on the same gloss as high art celebrated in museums and the media. Even when the artist is well known, the subjugation to the bureaucratic process can become demeaning.

Perhaps Christo, with his enormous projects that require years of negotiation with government agencies for the sake of a piece of art that is quite temporary, is one of the few artists who has been able to rise above the problems of civic art. With all this ambivalence about art and its role in society as well as how we sequester most art in museums, it’s not surprising that we don’t consider spiritual art.

The Life of Making

The only life I know is a life of making. I grew up in a potter’s studio. I am an artist, graphic designer, and writer. Creativity is my work.

What does that feel like? It feels like being a spirit medium or oracle. I’m not trying to claim extraordinary significance or authority. I’m only saying that answers come to me when I’m challenged. When that happens, as it does many times a day, it’s thrilling. I’ve come to value that connection as being revelatory and true.

But to be honest, those answers don’t always lead to worldly success or agreement from others. Not every person likes my art or my writing. I frequently have to revise designs for clients. I can’t even be sure that my wife will agree on my restaurant suggestion for dinner (my success rate is probably about 2%). Still, I trust that source like a homesteader who trusts a gushing well.

On a more subtle level, the ideas I have don’t always give me art that I like myself. I throw away more than I keep. I revise repeatedly. Receiving the creative flow is just the first step. Questions of my own readiness and skill follow. One has to have craft, and that takes decades to develop. The ideas come but they have to be interpreted in the midst of contradiction and practicality. Sometimes pure and abstract ideas can’t become part of the real world.

The fact that so many revelations wither hasn’t changed my faith in them. When I was younger, that confused me. How could something I strongly trusted not lead to constant success? I have slowly understood that I first have to be able to make an idea physical and that my own abilities or the limitation of materials can hinder that expression. I’ve learned that my ideas don’t mean that other people want them, because they are on their own searches. I may have ideas, but so do millions of other people, and the culture may stream far from where I am. I can only offer. I’ve found a faith in the long-term: sometimes an idea has to spread slowly over many years after it’s taken form.

How does that intersect with martial arts? You make yourself. You might think it’s in memorizing the movements, exploring the poetic names, researching the history, or even in outright combat. It’s deeper than that. Each day of training is a day of creativity. You make yourself. You begin with the idea, whether it might be good health, grace, strength, or spirituality. Then you struggle to make it real. You strive to overcome the range of motion of which you’re currently capable. You endeavor to make your movements more accurate. You work to extend your stamina. You drive to unite body, mind, and spirit. Each day, your degree of success will vary. You will sometimes be highly dissatisfied with yourself. On a few days a year you may find yourself at a peak and you will be ecstatic—only to realize that when you get to the summit, you can only hike down—or look for a higher peak.

Creativity needs tending—like keeping a fire. Maybe there’s plenty of fuel nearby, but the fire has to be fed, the ashes raked out of the pit, and air either fanned toward it or the wind shielded from it. That takes patience, devotion, and steadiness. Over time, the reward is in the many visions glimpsed in the flames.

The only life I know is a life of making. Acting based on ideas that come from a trusted source. Making things according to a vision. Shaping oneself to be one’s most vital. That is the life of making.