Innovative Exhibition Showcases Calligraphy in 16,384 Ways

2016年7月13日

Seven large kinetic installations are turning calligraphy into a dynamic, moving art form that can be seen in 16,384 different ways.

The New Taipei City Art Center is currently showcasing “16384 of Silent Music,” an innovative calligraphy exhibition by Taiwanese calligrapher Tong Yang-tze and Paris-based art collective Active Creative Design. The large-scale pieces rotate to engage the audience in the strokes and dots of calligraphy, instead of the form of each character.

Tong is known for integrating traditional and contemporary, Eastern and Western elements in her calligraphy, which has become her signature in the traditional art. The 73-year-old artist breaks down the characters written in calligraphy hoping that people can grow to appreciate the beauty of each brushstroke.

Ho Kuei-yu from Active Creative Design says the team developed the form of aesthetics based on an initial proposal by Tong. The calligrapher provided the team with a set of works of the same size, and Active Creative Design developed an approach using these works as a base.

Ho says the team wanted to stay in the realm of pictorial art, so they gave up every technology that could stray away from it, such as projections, multimedia entertainment and tactile interfaces. At the same time, Active Creative Design developed the idea of a dynamic exhibition that plays with the possible combination between all these different fragments and integrated them into the exhibition space.

“The idea of the seven rotary devices therefore came naturally,” says Ho. “They play between full and empty, white and black, and between the three dimensions of space, while bringing a rich variety of combinations that evolve softly, with respect for the artistic work.”

The devices, however, serve primarily as an original mode of composition and do not constitute the goal of the exhibition by themselves.

“We were not interested in speed and movement, but rather the ability to depict a set of combinations, establishing new relationships between all the fragments,” says Ho. A total of six calligraphy works of Tong was patterned onto the seven kinetic installations, producing 16,384 configurations.

“16384 of Silent Music” is currently on display at The New Taipei City Art Center and will run until Aug. 28.