Sculptures made of 200 000 Chinese hieroglyphs: Zheng Lu’s artworks

At all times calligraphy in China has been considered a true art, a refined form of painting. Contemporary sculptor Zheng Lu takes hieroglyphs as a basis of his artworks. “Lace of hieroglyphs” executed from stainless steel licks the figures into an original shape and meanwhile fills these sculptures with some extra sense.

Zheng Lu mainly uses classical Chinese poetry and prose in his works. One of his most famous sculptures is a “frozen” water splash. This artwork contains lines from the poem Wan Zhi Shui (literally “Playing with water”) by Bai Juyi, a poet from the Tang Dynasty.

Obviously it is not easy to read the verse. The sculptures look tracery from afar but one can distinguish a text at close range. Moreover, master Zheng Lu skillfully uses a variety of fonts to complicate the puzzle. The author says it would not be interesting if something that is encoded in this or that sculpture was easy to solve.

Zheng Lu used over 200000 hieroglyphs to create his masterpieces. He has learnt calligraphy like the palm of his hand since a little child. All members of his family were fond of reading and they tried to inculcate in the child a taste for classics. His parents were of encyclopedic knowledge Zheng’s father always insisted the boy should learn calligraphy. These skills were of use to Zheng Lu years ago. The “textual” component makes his sculptures unique masterpieces endowed with profound aesthetic sense.

It is worth mentioning a famous sculptor Jaume Plensa, who is a recognized amateur to experiment with the alphabet. But, unlike Zheng Lu, he places letters in a random order and his masterpieces are much bigger than the creations of his Chinese colleague.

Sculptures made of hieroglyphs: Zheng Lu’s artworks

Source: www.kulturologia.ru