空
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| 空. (2019) |
Catalogue Essay:
The Script of Emptiness (空)
I. The Work as Image and Gesture
At first glance, the work overwhelms: a torrent of characters floods the surface, each stroke charged with restless energy, until the eye cannot distinguish word from noise. Yet amidst this sea of ink, one perceives something wholly unexpected: a void. In this untouched whiteness emerges the pictogram 空 — the Chinese character for “emptiness” and “sky.”
This inversion — writing that reveals through absence — is radical. Calligraphy has traditionally been the art of inscription, but here inscription becomes the art of erasure and negation. The artist does not “write 空”; instead, they surround it, strangle it, and in doing so, allow it to appear. What is not written becomes the most legible mark.
Thus, the work is an act of paradox: fullness generates emptiness; excess gives birth to silence.
II. Psychoanalytic Dimensions
Psychoanalytically, the compulsive density of the script suggests repetition, obsession, the inexhaustible attempt of the unconscious to “speak itself” through signifiers. The writing here is not to communicate but to discharge: to cover, to layer, to saturate.
Yet it is precisely through this saturation that a gap opens — a gap that forms meaning. The emergence of 空 is akin to what Lacan calls the Real — that which cannot be symbolized directly, but which insists, negatively, through absence. The word 空 thus becomes the unspoken kernel around which all obsessive inscription revolves.
We might say: the artist writes endlessly, but what they truly write is the impossibility of writing itself. The void becomes the truest letter.
III. Daoist-Buddhist Resonances
In Daoist and Buddhist thought, 空 is not mere nothingness but a productive emptiness — the fertile void from which form arises. Laozi speaks of the usefulness of the empty vessel, while the Heart Sutra declares: “色即是空, 空即是色” (form is emptiness, emptiness is form).
The artist’s strategy echoes this wisdom: ink drowns the page, yet the meaning rests in what is left untouched. Emptiness is not the negation of form but its highest expression. Just as in Zen painting, where a single blank expanse suggests infinity, here the white pictogram 空 radiates as the true subject, held in tension by the restless darkness that surrounds it.
In this sense, the work stages a dialogue between the compulsive mind and the emptied mind. Between the fever of thought and the release of meditation. Between samsara’s cycles and nirvana’s stillness.
IV. Historical and Aesthetic Lineage
The gesture belongs to a lineage of both East and West:
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From Chinese calligraphy, it inherits the primacy of brushstroke and void.
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From Zen ensō practice, it borrows the notion that emptiness is illumination.
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From Western abstraction — especially the textual experiments of Cy Twombly and the écriture automatique of Surrealism — it resonates with the attempt to push writing beyond meaning.
Yet the synthesis here is uniquely contemporary: a script that is both legible and illegible, a pictogram both absent and present, a void both empty and full.
V. Conclusion
This piece is not simply calligraphy. It is a philosophical event: the writing of the unwritten.
By drowning the page in obsessive characters, the artist paradoxically reveals the most essential character of all — 空. In doing so, they embody the Daoist paradox: it is in emptiness that fullness dwells, and in silence that the loudest meaning is heard.
Short Exhibition Text
“空 (Emptiness)”
A storm of obsessive script overwhelms the page, yet from this density emerges a single word — 空 (emptiness, sky). Not written but revealed, the character appears as a void carved out of ink.
Here, meaning is inverted: the true writing lies in absence. The work fuses Buddhist meditation with psychoanalytic compulsion, showing how endless thought can paradoxically unveil stillness.
Emptiness is not negation but fullness — the most eloquent word, written by silence itself.
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