the feather of Ma'at

<p>This text attempts to address the question '<em>what is the weight of a painting?' </em>A question that came to me not quite as a question but as a musing. From a painter nonetheless. And perhaps more significantly from Ng Joon Kiat a painter who has long been questioning painting and not just through the question of '<em>what is a painting'</em> that is the materiality of what is added to dabbed onto plastered on a canvas on wood onto aluminium on a surface but who is on a quest to explore '<em>paint'</em> itself on a journey of '<em>playing with paint'</em>.</p><p> </p><p>So a question that might never quite have been meant for me. Thus quite possibly only a quest that I am embarking on only because I have heard it as a question have heard it call out to me heard its call as a question have taken it as to be a question have inscribed the mark of a question on it. Have made it significant because I first started marking on it have let it weigh on me. </p><p> </p><p><em>'</em><strong><em>W</em></strong><em>hat is the weight of a painting?'</em></p><p> </p><p>Which is not the same question as '<em>how much does a painting weigh?'</em> For that all you have to do is to get a scale.</p><p> </p><p>But rather a question of '<em>its weight'</em>: of how much it '<em>weighs down'</em> - not just on you even as that is certainly part of the question but perhaps even on itself.</p><p> </p><p>And where the text opens the possibility that the image is '<em>the weightless weight' </em>one encounters - is the site of a coming-together of the work and the one who stands before it whether by sight or in the mind's eye - in the '<em>gap between the frame and the viewer'</em>; and like the feather of Ma'at is the juncture in which judgment occurs where there is a weighing out where the status of the work as art is quite possibly weighed up where there is a weighing in by everyone involved and where what is considered 'good' might well entail an absence of weight.</p>