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For Frenk Meeuwsen, a drawing is like a Zen garden: wavy lines on snow-white paper. In those lines, he searches for the essence of Japan, for truth, and for himself. His book Zen Without a Master is visual philosophy. How does the sound of one clapping hand sound? This famous riddle from Zen philosophy is simply solved by Meeuwsen: it 'sounds' like applause in sign language for the deaf. Of course he makes a drawing of it, but this solution is also characteristic of his approach to spirituality, because it makes you laugh. With Dutch common sense, he tackles Japanese Buddhism, and thus comes to surprising discoveries.-Joost Polmann
About the author
Frenk Meeuwsen (b. 1965) is a Dutch painter and visualizer from Amsterdam. He studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten. He is also a practitioner of martial arts and has a black belt in karate. His fascination with the philosophical thinking of the Far East took him to Japan in the mid-1990s, where he lived in the temple city of Kyoto. Meeuwsen has exhibited his art at home and abroad and made his debut as a comics artist with 'Zen Without Master'. It was followed in 2020 by the semi-autobiographical 'Jaarn Nul'.
