The One Who Hears the Cries of the World (2026)

Is it really possible to love everyone?

The generative software artwork The One Who Hears the Cries of the World, is based on the hidden geometry underlying Avalokiteshvara (in Tibetan, Chenrezig), the Buddhist archetype of love and compassion. Love, cultivated through expansive meditations, means wishing all beings to be happy; compassion, wishing them freedom from suffering.

Custom software refracts the colors of a traditional Tibetan Buddhist thangka painting through geometric diagrams that have guided Himalayan painters for centuries.

In twelve-minute cycles that never repeat, the forms evolve from a color-field void into intricate complexity, then dissolve back into emptiness—the ultimate interdependence of all things.

Sit on a cushion before the piece and see whether it helps you imagine a better world — and how each of us might help bring it about.

 About the Hidden Geometries Series

Protector of the World is part of the Hidden Geometries series, based on the grids that Himalayan painters have used for centuries. I learned these techniques over the past 24 years from master Tibetan and Nepalese thangka artists in Nepal and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Like other works in the series, this one is inspired by the long South Asian lineage of devotional art. Unlike much Western art, which often emphasizes cultural, aesthetic, or intellectual content, devotional art seeks to induce a direct inner experience. My work continue that tradition, aiming to evoke specific meditative states in the viewer.

The thangka paintings upon which these works are based are part of Tibetan Buddhism’s Vajrayana tradition. In this form of Buddhism, we understand both these archetypes of enlightenment and ourselves to be comprised of three “bodies”: our physical body, our mind, and an energetic body that bridges them. We experience this energetic body that translates mind to matter when we speak, dance, exercise, play music—and make art.

In tantric visualization practice, the archetype one imagines relates to this energetic body, embodying qualities like love, compassion, wisdom, and power. Its form arises in meditation from a field of infinite light and clarity, into which it eventually dissolves. I echo that process in each artwork’s evolution: emerging from a single color field into which it eventually dissolves.

Technically, each software art piece is executed as custom computer software written by the artist that is rendered in real time on a small computer mounted on the back of the display. It filters a low-resolution image of a traditional thangka painting through the sacred geometry of the particular archetype. These cycles are not video loops, but continuous algorithmic renderings translated through the “mind” of the computer.