Art as a Translation
- Diamond Zhou
- Sep 5
- 9 min read
Updated: Oct 16
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SATURDAY EVENING POST
September 6th, 2025
Art, like language, always carries within it an element of translation. The artist translates their inner vision into medium, the medium into artifact, the artifact into reception. None of these stages are perfect. Something is always lost, maybe the immediacy of intuition, the cadence of a phrase, the exactness of a feeling, but something is always gained: endurance, accessibility, the possibility of being shared, renewed, and discovered.
Philosophers of art have sometimes described this through a triadic model: the genesis of a work, like the inner conception and the conditions that shape it; the artifact, like the material object or performance; the effects, which is the aesthetic and non-aesthetic responses it produces in its audience.
But the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce famously resisted this division, insisting that the true work of art exists only in the artist’s mind as an act of intuition-expression. For Croce, the canvas or score is not art itself but a mere stimulus, a way for others to reconstruct, or reconcile what once lived in the artist’s imagination.
Between Croce’s idealism and the materialist triad lies a fertile tension. If art exists only in the mind, what happens when the artist cannot execute their vision? If it exists only in artifacts, what of the ineffable intuitions that cannot be captured? And if it exists only in effects, what of the silent painting unseen in storage, unheard symphony in empty theatres, or unpublished manuscript on shelves?
To navigate these questions, it is helpful to think of art not only as object or intuition but as translation. Translation clarifies the challenges of skill, medium, temporality, and reception. As Walter Benjamin wrote in his essay The Task of the Translator (1923), translation is never about equivalence but about “the afterlife” of a work: the way it continues to live and be reborn in other forms and languages. Art, too, survives through continual acts of translation: from mind to medium, from time to time, from culture to culture.
The Trapped Idea: Genesis
Genesis refers to the beginning of an artwork, as the vision in the artist’s mind, the mental states both conscious and unconscious, the influences of society and history, the conversations with peers, the anxieties and obsessions that shape creation. Genesis is what Croce sought to preserve in his notion of art as intuition-expression.
Yet here lies a problem. What of the artist who lacks the ability to execute their vision? For one without skill in drawing, sculpting, or composing, the vision remains trapped inside, like a thought never spoken. Even for trained artists, sometimes the vision exceeds the medium, the mind sees more than the hand can achieve.
This is where training becomes crucial. Technique is not the source of vision but its liberator. Without mastery of a medium, the idea may remain imprisoned. Consider the old claim that “painting is dead.” Perhaps it was radical and necessary once, but often it is repeated, conveniently, by those who never painted or never painted well enough to realise their visions. Sometimes the psychosis of so much contemporary art lies in the fact that it is easier to declare painting dead than to face the discipline it demands, or easier to work with theory than to materialise an idea. However, Croce would argue that the inner vision is already art; but for others, for the audience, for history, without artifact, the work disappears.
The analogy with language is immediate. To be bilingual is to be troubled, and to know the tension of finding no exact equivalent in the second tongue. However, being monolingual is to live with the anxiety that there may be feelings one cannot put into words. So too with art: without the fluency of medium, the artist risks being silenced by their own vision.
Artifact
The artifact is the work as it appears in the world: the painting on canvas, the poem written on paper, the performance enacted. It is what survives beyond the artist’s life. Yet artifacts are not neutral vessels. Mediums resist, reshape, and sometimes even generate the work themselves.
Every artist knows this, that oil paint dries slowly and invites revision, while watercolour bleeds unpredictably. Clay cracks in the kiln, and marble hides veins. These accidents and resistances are not failures but forces in dialogue with vision. Sometimes the final work looks nothing like the genesis, not because the artist fell short, but because the medium took the lead.
Consider Claude Monet’s Water Lilies. The genesis may have been his gardens in Giverny, but the artifact is as much about paint itself, like its capacity to layer, to blur, to dissolve form into atmosphere. What survives is not only Monet’s perception (or his lack of the ability for perception due to his failing eyesight) but the medium’s insistence. Perhaps, the artifact speaks a language of its own.
Photography deepens this paradox. For those inspired by external scenes, it liberates. The camera records what the eye beholds but the hand cannot reproduce. However, may I say that photography is also tyrannical a machine indifferent to feeling. Unless the artist masters aperture, shutter, and composition, the photograph betrays the vision. Seeing is personal and emotive, yet the lens is technical. The photograph is never a perfect translation of sight but a negotiation between human perception and mechanical apparatus.
This is why John Dewey, in Art as Experience (1934), emphasized the role of medium as integral to meaning. “The medium,” he wrote, “is not just a channel; it enters into the structure of the work and colors its import.” The artifact is not a delivery device but an active shaper of the work. Croce’s intuition may be primary, but without artifact, vision lacks endurance, and without medium, it lacks form.
Effects
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Does art exist without being seen or heard? Croce would say yes: in the mind of the artist. But what about the theory that work is only complete when it produces effects. An unseen painting exists materially, but it is dormant, like a text unread.
Here temporality complicates matters. Paintings seem timeless, yet they often capture the fleeting. A single moment, a woman’s gaze, a cloud at dusk, the bloom of a flower is fixed in pigment. A century later, that moment still feels immediate. Van Gogh’s wheatfields are urgent now as in 1888. The artifact has arrested time, releasing the fleeting moment again and again into the present.
But temporal arts, such as music and performance, vanish once enacted. Their existence is intermittent, as they live in sound waves and disappear when the vibrations stop. As John Hospers noted, between performances, music exists only as score or memory, this makes them fragile but also powerful. Each performance is unique, unrepeatable.
Ephemeral art sharpens the dilemma. Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, built in 1970 from basalt rock extending into Utah’s Great Salt Lake, is now sometimes submerged, eroded, altered by water and salt. Does it still exist (It does right now, what about another half a century)? Its artifact is unstable, but its effects continue through documentation, photographs, and cultural memory. Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s wrapped buildings and bridges, dismantled after weeks, live on through photographs and testimony. Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present (2010) exists only in memory and video documentation, its true power was in the unrepeatable encounters in the MoMA atrium.
Dewey emphasized this temporal dimension, arguing that art is not just the object but the experience of it unfolding. “A work of art,” he wrote, “is not the object itself, but what the object does with and in experience.” This insight bridges genesis and effect: without reception, the artifact is incomplete.
The Trouble of Translation
“Translation” illuminates these dilemmas with particular clarity. Let us look at the parallel, literature makes the problem obvious, words are not mere sounds but symbols with assigned meanings. To read Rilke in German is not the same as reading him in English. The dictionary sense may carry over, but rhythm, resonance, and connotation often do not.
Take the English phrase “My God!” and the French “Mon Dieu.” Both are literal equivalents, yet their emotive weight differs. In English, the phrase can carry shock, awe, even despair. In French, it is milder, almost casual. In Chinese, the problem grows deeper: “God” itself does not translate neatly. In some texts it appears as “Heaven”, or more literally, “Above, the coloured sky,” a Tang dynasty phrase evoking vastness and cosmology rather than a personal deity. What is lost in a reading is not fact but feeling, the cadence, the sense of intimacy, the precise weight of the word.
So too with “sublime.” In English, it evokes the divine, the infinite, the overwhelming. In Chinese, the word does not quite exist in the same context, the closest equivalent is “sublimation,” a scientific process: a solid transforming into gas. The grandeur of the sublime becomes lost. How then to translate the feeling of standing before a mountain, a cathedral, or a Rothko canvas, if the very word is missing? And what of the Chinese words with no English counterpart, words that more precisely name the grandeur beyond “sublime,” leaving English struggling to keep up?
As some translators observe, translation is never mere substitution, because it requires fluency, empathy, and cultural knowledge. A good translator must know not only words but histories, connotations, rhythms, contexts. So too must the artist know their medium. To move vision into clay, paint, or sound is not to find one-to-one equivalents but to remake the vision under new constraints. Every artwork is thus a translation, partial and approximate, shaped as much by loss as by gain. Benjamin argued in The Task of the Translator that translation is not about reproducing the original but about revealing its “afterlife.” The true task of translation, he wrote, is to carry the work beyond its origin, into new languages and contexts. The same applies to art: the artifact is never the perfect mirror of genesis, but its afterlife. And each audience, each effect, is another translation, another rebirth of the work.
This raises a provocative question: do artists need translators? In one sense, they are their own translators, carrying genesis into artifact. But curators, critics, and writers also act as translators, situating the work in culture and history, rendering it legible, and sometime eligible, for audiences. And audiences themselves must translate, perceiving, interpreting, reconstructing vision in their own minds.
Here lies the responsibility of reception. If the artifact is incomplete without effects, then audiences must learn to be good translators. Just as reading poetry in translation requires patience and imagination, so does viewing art. Audiences must stretch perception, deepen knowledge, and resist easy interpretations. Art is not a closed message but an invitation to co-translate. Can we be faithful audiences? Not perfectly. But we can be generous, attentive, rigorous. In doing so, we honour both genesis and artifact, allowing the work to continue living in its effects. In some ways, to ask whether art exists in the mind, in the object, or in the encounter is to miss the point. Art exists in the movement between, in the fragile bridges of translation that carry vision into form, form into experience, experience into memory. In that continual passage, art never dies, it is always reborn.
CURRENT
GROUP EXHIBITION
This exhibition gathers artists whose practices transform material and perception into experiences that linger, works that shift the way we see light, inhabit space, and feel the weight and presence of form. United by a balance of beauty and thought, these pieces invite us to step into moments where looking becomes a deeper act of seeing. Exhibition features works by Michael Bjornson, Edward Burtynsky, James W. Chiang, Ronald T. Crawford, Deirdre Hofer, Jan Hoy, Robert Kelly, Marion Landry, James O’Mara, David Spriggs, Charlotte Wall, and many more of our artists and works from our collection.
