Emptiness: The History of ________ in Art, Religion, and Philosophy

Undergraduate / Graduate

This experimental course explores emptiness not simply as absence, but as a powerful cultural, spiritual, and aesthetic force. Moving across philosophy, religious thought, science, and the arts, the course asks how emptiness has been theorized, experienced, feared, imposed, and cultivated-from Buddhist and apophatic traditions to colonial concepts such as terra nullius, from modern physics and philosophy to contemporary art and digital practices like doomscrolling. Students will engage texts by figures such as Georges Perec, Meister Eckhart, Simone Weil, Martin Heidegger, John Cage, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Byung-Chul Han, alongside close study of artistic practices ranging from Zen ink painting to Yves Klein, Agnes Martin, and the Dansaekhwa movement. The course also addresses emptiness as a social condition, examining themes of hyper-connectivity, consumerism, colonial "empty spaces," silence, and withdrawal. Through seminars, lectures, site-specific discussions, and collaborative exercises, students are encouraged to think across traditions and disciplines. Rather than offering a single definition, the course treats emptiness as a shifting field-at once unsettling and generative-where art, spirituality, and modern life intersect."