Word Games
The Chinese language has relatively few syllables but many meanings. It's also full of rules and non-rules, where words can gain and change meaning depending on how they're used, much like the rules of different games.
Word Games explores what happens when language becomes the subject rather than the medium, playing with words until they reveal something that was always hiding in plain sight. Repeating and rearranging characters, pairing opposites, using words that sound the same but carry different meanings, twisting the visual structure of characters, bending sound and rhythm, each piece stretches the language's rules and non-rules to reveal the strange physics of the language itself.
The idea is to take something familiar and assemble it in different ways until the words are no longer just words, and become something else.
Word Games: Not Big Not Small (没大没小)
ARTWORK DETAILS: NOT BIG NOT SMALL
Calligraphy ink on raw xuan paper, wet-mounted.
Float-mounted on wood panel and framed in teak.
One piece only. Available online here.
Word Games: Tongue Twisters (躲音字)
Fee fi fo fum. Eeny meeny miny moe.
Words are fancy, words are fun, words can have meaning, and they can be dumb.
What about words in another language?
In Chinese, some characters can have multiple pronunciations, with their meanings changing depending on the sound. These are called duōyīnzì (多音字), literally "many-sound word."
Tongue Twisters plays with duōyīnzì (多音字) and other Chinese characters that sound nearly identical. Reading them out loud is silly and frustrating, but challenging and fun.
They sound silly at first, nonsensical at best. But are they really?
ARTWORK DETAILS: TONGUE TWISTERS
Calligraphy ink on raw xuan paper, wet-mounted.
Unframed. One piece only. Not for sale.