15 December 2012

Fusion calligraphy

The exhibition on Chinese calligraphy at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum - which is on till 13 January - looks wonderful - see various videos on the exhibition website
calligraphy by Haji Noor Deen
One of the events linked to the Chinese calligraphy exhibition at San Francisco Asian Art Museum was by an Arabic calligrapher, Haji Noor Deen, who writes in "chinese-looking" characters - rather like Xu Bing's Square Word Calligraphy makes English words look like chinese characters. 

Xu Bing (with a team of 14 people) has created an animation for the exhibition - here's one of his sketches for it -
Read more about "The Character of Characters" on the museum's blog.

Why is this fusion is so fascinating - is it saying something about the difference of writing traditions, or something fundamental about writing itself, or is it just a bit of fun?

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