Painting Beauty, Singing Rhythm, Dancing Melody
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| Painting Beauty, Singing Rhythm, Dancing Melody. (2019) |
Catalogue Essay
Painting Beauty, Singing Rhythm, Dancing Melody
In 1930, Lu Xun distilled the essence of artistic creation into a terse triad:
“画美感，歌节奏，舞旋律” — Painting is beauty, song is rhythm, dance is melody.
This fragment has haunted generations of artists for its clarity, its almost mathematical condensation of what art does: beauty, rhythm, melody — form, time, and motion. Yet what if these three categories were not separate but could be folded into one gesture? What if painting sang, song danced, and dance wrote itself?
The works before us, explosive in ink and gesture, attempt precisely this fusion.
Between Calligraphy and Painting
Chinese calligraphy has always straddled the boundary between text and image. But here, legibility dissolves. Characters stretch until they nearly burst, strokes erupt like splinters of volcanic rock, and space itself is made to tremble. What we see is not only writing but also painting with the unconscious of language.
The brush becomes a seismograph of thought. It records not only words but the tremors of the body and psyche: hesitation, acceleration, fury, release. Like the Abstract Expressionists of the West, the artist discovers beauty not in perfection but in raw intensity, in the nakedness of gesture.
Song: Rhythm in Ink
There is rhythm in the spacing, rhythm in the breath between strokes. Sometimes the brush races, sometimes it lingers — silence expanding into void. The eye moves across the sheet as though across a musical score. Each mark is a beat, each blank a rest.
But this rhythm is not external or metrical; it is the biological rhythm of the body — pulse, breath, tremor, the syncopation of lived time. The ink’s rhythm mirrors the unseen rhythm of life itself.
Dance: The Body Made Visible
Perhaps most powerfully, the works are dance. Each stroke corresponds to a motion of the body — the sweep of the arm, the twist of the torso, the suspension of the wrist. The viewer can reconstruct the absent dancer from the traces left behind.
This is the paradox of calligraphy-as-dance: movement becomes frozen, yet still vibrates. The lines carry the weight of momentum, the sudden halt, the flick, the leap. It is choreography rendered permanent.
Psychoanalytic Undercurrent
Beneath the surface lies a deeper conflict.
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The ego tries to hold on to recognizable script.
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The id erupts in splashes and broken edges.
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The superego, centuries of calligraphic tradition, is both honored and mocked.
The works thus stage a drama: not only between East and West, word and image, but within the artist’s own psyche. They are battlefields of desire and discipline, chaos and control.
A Total Art
To stand before these works is to witness an art that refuses boundaries. It is not merely calligraphy, nor painting, nor music, nor dance — it is all of them simultaneously.
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Painting, because it invents a beauty born of raw form.
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Song, because it pulses with rhythm.
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Dance, because every mark is a gesture suspended in space.
What Lu Xun offered as a taxonomy has here become a synthesis. The work insists that these three essences are not separate but aspects of one act: the act of being alive, the act of moving ink across paper, the act of giving form to nothingness.
Exhibition Wall Text
Painting Beauty, Singing Rhythm, Dancing Melody
This series fuses calligraphy, painting, music, and dance into a single gesture. Inspired by Lu Xun’s phrase — “Painting is beauty, song is rhythm, dance is melody” — the artist transforms brushstrokes into living motion.
Here, ink is no longer only language. It is painting for the eye, song for the ear, and dance for the body. Each stroke is rhythm, each line is movement, each composition is beauty found in intensity.
The works are not to be read, but to be felt — as rhythm, as motion, as presence.
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