About this event

“There Was Another World”: Creative Writing in Response to Divine Immersion: The Experiential Art of Nick Dong with Mushim Patricia Ikeda

“There was another world, and it was in this one.” -French poet Paul Éluard.

This was a fun creative writing class, open to all, including Deaf and Blind participants.

Participants joined us for brief, guided journaling exercises in response to meditative video clips and music from the USC Pacific Asia Museum’s exhibition Divine Immersion: The Experiential Art of Nick Dong. No previous writing experience was required.

Mushim Patricia Ikeda is a published author of poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction. She is also a well-known mindfulness meditation teacher and a core teacher at East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, California. www.mushimikeda.com

For questions or to request accommodations for the event, participants contacted Cristina Hernandez-Guerrero at ch45852@usc.edu. For additional information, they visited https://pacificasiamuseum.usc.edu/.

The Zoom link had been shared a week before the event.

More about Mushim Patricia Ikeda:

Mushim Patricia Ikeda is a core teacher of mindfulness meditation and Buddhism at East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, California. She is also a writer of poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction published in various arts and Buddhist anthologies and journals. East Bay Meditation Center is based in a commitment to diversity, equity, social justice, and radical inclusivity for people of all abilities.

More about Divine Immersion: The Experiential Art of Nick Dong:

We as a human population had just experienced an overwhelming amount of disorder and confusion. It was inside us. It was in our past. It weighed heavily in our present. It was in the unknowable future. To help us lay our burden down, artist Nick Dong extended an invitation to visitors ripe for this moment: “Bring all of your chaos to this exhibition.” His artwork met visitors in the middle with ordering principles. What we created together was both beautiful and hopeful.

Taiwanese-American and Oakland, CA-based artist Nick Dong (b. 1973) identified as a 21st-century continuation of Wen-ren, the Chinese cultural lineage of intellect-scholars. Each work was a quest for self-evolution, a vehicle for sharing philosophy. By carefully integrating scientific and handcrafted components, supernatural movements, light, sound, and interactive strategies, Dong’s artworks produced a fully immersive event, only complete when the viewer activated it with their energy. Dong formulated his work to be incomplete without the viewer for good reason: To ignite an encounter that opened up new perspectives about each other and the world, illuminated the beauty in our broken places, and thus created space for hope and healing.

Converging his training as an artist and engineer with thousands of years of Buddhist tradition, 21st-century technology, and all the chaos we could muster, Dong’s work nourished the transformative potential of this moment — toward human wholeness, imperfections encouraged and included.