A personal experience of art transforming one’s perspective

This piece is part of In Common, a collaborative writing series where voices from across the healthcare community respond to a single shared word. For our inaugural theme, Thresholds, Evangeline Chai reflects on how we might be able to cross the threshold between our patients and ourselves to find new meaning in the relationship.

Naoshima is a place where art finds you.

It is all around you, as though thresholds have been blurred. You are invited to step in, slow down, engage and explore art.

This Japanese island, shielded from the hustle and bustle of city life, is home to a variety of art installations including sculptures, paintings, and even whole buildings. The overarching message I got is: art can be a tool to evoke meaningful conversations.

Take for instance Open Field by James Turrell, located within Chichu Art Museum. It looked plain from the outside: just a set of steps leading to a blue rectangular centre. But as the museum guide guided us up the steps, and eventually into the rectangle itself, we stepped past an imaginary “threshold” into a whole new world: one filled with light, shadows and colour. Stepping further into the open space, I continued down the gentle slope towards the edges of the artwork, exploring different visual angles whilst the light projections continued. It was truly an immersive experience, one I would never have imagined just looking from the outside.

This got me thinking: could we potentially step in and engage our patients through their stories, like how I stepped in to engage with the artwork? Perhaps it is easier said than done, with humans having emotional and psychosocial needs unlike inanimate objects. Often, the burden of disease may be too overwhelming for our patients to even begin a conversation. But I believe that if we start to pick up subtle cues from our patients’ histories, and affirm or empathise with them in their joys and struggles, we might just be able to get past that “threshold” and create new meaning in the patient-clinician relationship.

Evangeline Chai is a pharmacist who also appreciates art, music, and nature, and their relationship with human life.