Country and Limits

Country and Limits. (2019)

Text by Hamamoto Satoshi

 This new work immediately strikes with a density of energy, but unlike the earlier pieces of floating fragments or rhythmic strokes, here the characters are more structured, commanding, and monumental. It reads almost like a political proclamation, a carved stele, or a state edict—except instead of being orderly and static, the brushwork is restless, layered, at times overwriting itself.

Here are some interpretive angles that could frame the psycho-aesthetic analysis of the artist’s intention:

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1. The Nation as Text / The Text as Nation

Words such as 国 (nation, state), 事 (affairs), and 力 (power) recur strongly, suggesting that this work is engaging with the imagined body of the nation. In psychoanalytic terms, the artist is externalizing anxiety about political or cultural unity by literally inscribing it—turning the page into a battlefield where different strokes fight for dominance. The crowding of words reflects the impossibility of fully capturing “the nation” in one coherent line of writing.

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2. Influence of Monumental Calligraphy

Unlike the whispering fragmentation of your earlier piece, here we hear echoes of Mao-era wall slogans or even older Han dynasty stelae. The brush is thick, emphatic, and declamatory—yet deliberately refuses total order. This tension may be influenced by artists such as Xu Bing (Book from the Sky) who deconstructed textual authority, or by the tradition of “wild cursive” (狂草) which turns the Confucian discipline of calligraphy into a storm of gesture.

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3. Philosophical Duality: Law vs. Flow

This piece sits at the intersection of Confucian and Daoist aesthetics:

• Confucian: the insistence on structure, nation, duty, hierarchy.

• Daoist: the refusal to remain fixed, the restless rewriting, the overlapping currents.
  The psyche of the artist, then, may be navigating between obedience to form and urge for dissolution—a reflection of the modern individual caught between collective identity and personal freedom.

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4. Psychoanalytic Reading

The repetition of 国 (nation) might be seen as a compulsion of return (Freud’s Wiederholungszwang). It suggests an unresolved trauma or fixation: the nation as both mother and prison. The overlapping lines, the blurred readability, enact the impossibility of direct articulation. It’s as if the artist is saying: the more we try to write the nation, the more we obscure it.

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5. Aesthetic Resonance

• Chinese precedent: The turbulence of late Tang cursive calligraphy (Zhang Xu, Huai Su).

• Western parallel: Cy Twombly’s political graffiti-like canvases, where history and writing collapse into a storm of marks.

• Philosophical kinship: Derrida’s notion of “différance”—that meaning is always deferred, never fully present. The nation, like the word, is never whole but constantly rewritten.

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✨ In essence:
This work can be seen as a meditation on collective identity and fragmentation, the impossibility of fixing history into one narrative, and the tension between discipline and chaos. It is both a proclamation and a protest, a monument and its undoing.