Chi wiz

It’s almost like a hand signal, the succinct motion and nod master craftsman and furniture maker Ford Thomas gives to one of his young charges once he sees Margaret Koai silently, meekly wending her way through Benchworks to a small corner of his massive Mid City woodshop. This, since the spring, has been Koai’s corner.

At Ford’s signal, the buzzing of a saw stops, and the garage rock shredding through a weathered boom box is muted. The warehouse grows quiet, almost reverently so. Lights flicker on above, revealing the wide doors of a makeshift storage room. Koai swings each slowly open.

Inside are some of Baton Rouge’s latest Asian immigrants: large stone columns, sculpted by generations of wave erosion, from the Taihu lake region west of Shanghai. Koai was raised in Kaoh Siung, Taiwan, by her mother and dentist father, an art lover who owned a gallery that displayed scholar’s rocks and bonsai in the large metropolitan city. Koai imported the stones this summer after choosing them at a rock market near Hong Kong. She waited 15 months for the shipment to arrive by boat.

The artist pauses and runs a steady hand over the bulbous surface of a stone. Most are light shades of earth tones and nearly bone-smooth, but each has a unique personality born of the organic grooves, deep rivulets and oblong holes burrowed deep into the rock. The effect is at once calming and curious. Nicknamed scholar’s rocks, these stones were first revered by the great thinkers of ancient China, philosophers, mathematicians and architects who placed them in their gardens for peaceful reflection. By the mid-20th century, businessmen were using them to counter-balance their urban surroundings. Legend has it that if a stone’s finder thought it unsuitable for display, he would place it back in the river, draw a map to the location, and pass that map down to his children and grandchildren so future generations could return to the rock and see it transformed.

Viewing these standing stones in a natural environment is nothing like seeing a man-made sculpture in a museum. Whereas Michelangelo’s David incites wonder and awe at the craftsman’s determination and time-tested skill, these Asian scholar’s rocks invite the viewer to a safe, peaceful space where nature is a wise teacher and art is all around.

These are natural works of art, Koai says, and as such they offer an abstract chronology of the currents that once kept them buried from view.

Koai’s traditional bamboo brush and rice paper paintings are abstract, too, but in a different way. A mountainscape can become a dreamscape with surreal perspectives and unexpected twists and turns, because each is a figurative representation of a Tang Dynasty poem Koai and her classmates were tasked with memorizing as young girls in school.

“Like when you read Shakespeare and use some of the things in those poems so that people will know what we’re talking about, it’s a shorthand,” Koai says. “People recognize it and connect with it because of that shared knowledge. For me, it’s like painting from memory—a traveling memory. These are landscapes that, in the real world, won’t be happening.”

Behind the makeshift storage room and her scholar’s stones is a corner of the warehouse sectioned off like a Zen garden. A tip of incense burning makes this July morning day feel even warmer, and a stream of light from an industrial window twenty feet up reveals a dizzying display of wood particles moving through the air. Still, it is cozy, and as Koai says, “full of good chi.”

Here she sits at a small round table surrounded by scholar’s rocks—some standing tall, others cross-cut in thin slices and framed like paintings for homes and offices. Their marble-like patterns conjure calming waves, misty mountain ranges and grainy, surf-splashed pats of wet black sand.

Koai unrolls a recent painting, one silk-matted by a friend in Beijing, then draws a fold-out fan from a ceramic pitcher. She works her ink stick into a stone tablet, and soon the dark liquid pools out like blood trickling from a pricked finger. She uses the fan as a canvas, and in fewer than a dozen strokes, she completes an impressionist’s portrait of bamboo.

“Bamboo represents ‘gentleman,’” she says. “Less is more. Leaving space [without ink] on paper is like the rest note in music.”

Her childhood instructor taught her that. He also forbade her from using any color during her first year of painting. Now in her 40s, Koai still uses hue judiciously and tastefully.

Koai’s staggering humility also stems from her traditional Taiwanese education, during which painting was taught as being secondary to both poetry and calligraphy. “The least important is painting, because you see it already; there it is,” Koai says. “The poem is viewed in the highest position.”

Her best works, she says, incorporate all three in harmony.

Even after starting her own importing business, Inkstone, Ink, to bring her scholar’s stones into the United States, Koai is no self-promoter. She remains meticulous about her work, though. If there is one mistake in a painting, it will not receive her chop—an Asian artist’s stamped signature and seal of approval.

“She’s so humble, she’ll hold out on me,” says friend Cheri Fontenot, who owns several of Koai’s pieces. “She’ll have new work and not even mention it. It’ll be this great treasure that, in her own time, she’ll show me.”

Several of Koai’s pieces are available for purchase and on display at Sabai Jewelry Gallery at 711 Jefferson Hwy. inkstoneink.com