The Three Perfections
In ancient China, poetry, calligraphy, and painting are inseparable, acclaimed as the 3 perfections（三绝） of Chinese arts,
partly because scholars and scholarly-officials were trained from an early age of the “art of writing”, or calligraphy,
and they went on to use calligraphic strokes in their paintings and add calligraphy of poems to their paintings.
Of these 3, calligraphy is regarded as the highest form of arts, and is seen as a reflection of one’s character and disposition.
Chinese Character
Many people view Chinese characters（字） as pure ideograms, in fact, they are a mix of graphic and phonic experiences.
Chinese single characters started as ideograms representing concrete objects or actions, then gradually, audio aspects are integrated into the original “graphic symbols”, turning them into multi-sensorial phono-semantic compounds.
The most interesting thing is that, even the phono-part of a compound character, often contributes to its overall meaning.
(For instance, the complex character “清“ means clear, and it’s used to describe water. The left part of this character is ideographic which represents water, while the right part of the character is phonic, but it also conveys the meaning of a greenish color.)
Chinese Calligraphy
Chinese calligraphy（书） is a personalizable representation of meanings. The forms convey semantic meanings,
but also aesthetics and the calligrapher’s emotion then and there.
The same character, drawn in a different style, could mean subtly different things.
Chinese calligraphy allows viewers to appreciate it at multiple scales and distances.
If you zoom in at the separate parts of a character, each part represents a certain technique, motion, or state of mind of the calligrapher.
Look through it, you get meaning. Looking at it, you get emotion.
Chinese Poetry
Chinese poetry is again, a multi-sensorial experience. It relies on the organic combination of the audio, visual as well as the semantic.
Chinese traditional poems need to follow tonal patterns. E.g., the poem below sticks to an undulating sonic pattern as denoted by Zs and Ps.
It is a pity that when translated into English, the sonic rhythm of Chinese ancient poems is completely lost.
Similar to calligraphy, Chinese poems invite multiple layers of visual examination.
At a macro-scale, the whole poem tells a certain story or describes a certain scene.
In between, each sentence has their independent roles. And they have to follow a standard pattern in the transition of mood (起-承-转-合).
At a micro-scale, each character or word depicts an independent object or action.
This discreteness of poetic elements at a micro-level is unique to Chinese traditional poetry thanks to the condensity of the Chinese language.
The geographic correspondence of words is also a big part of the formal language.
Most intriguingly, at a nano level, the individual parts of the Chinese characters, also constitutes part of the visual and semantic richness.
Through intentional distribution of these parts, the poet often hint the readers of the hidden theme of the poem.
Another example is the famous Tang Dynasty poem Chun Jang Hua Yue Ye 春江花月夜 (“Moonlit River in Spring”) by Zhang Ruoxu.
In its first chapter, at a nano level, 2 contrasting character-parts (represented by the square and circle) appear periodically.
The square part stands for water while the circular part means moon. The regular recurrence of these two symbols (water and moon)
adds another layer of visual convolution and semantic abundance.
It is a wholistic experience to both look at the poem, perceiving the distribution of its sentences, characters and parts, and look through
the poem, absorbing the theme and atmosphere it’s portraying.
The calligraphy style adds another layer of semantic/emotional interpretation to a poem.
E.g., the 3 inscriptions below are actually the same poem paragraph written in different styles, which renders their atmosphere disparate,
the first being quiet and desolate, the second fluid and elegant, while the last bold and flamboyant.
Hence, how a poem is written (or drawn, so to say), is as important as what is written, if we are to understand its overall message.
Chinese Painting
Then I looked into Chinese traditional paintings. As mentioned above, Chinese painting, calligraphy, and poems are intertwined.
In the examples below, the geographic distribution and calligraphic styles (color, font, thickness) of the poems on the paintings are
in harmony with the paintings themselves.
Together (with the audio fluctuation while reading the poem), they form a wholistic aesthetic experience that
solicits imagination and embodiment of the poet’s spirituality.
It may seem that the poem is subsidiary to the whole painting. But in fact, the whole painting is just a visual embodiment of the poem.
That is because, a Chinese painter is often not a professional one, but a poet who likes to draw.
They would compose a poem first, and accompany that with a painting afterwards.
Thus, Chinese painting is not a reflection of real world scenery/events, but a materialization of the poet’s inner state and the poem.
The poem in a Chinese painting is like a circulation diagram in architectural design.
It directs audiences to navigate through a painting and make sense of it.
And because the poem is often non-linearly temporal, Chinese painting is also imbued with non-linear temporality.
In that sense, Chinese painting is similar to a 360 VR film represented as a series of spatial graphics,
granting viewers the unique temporal freedom to navigate through it.
Another example of Chinese painting’s non-linear temporality comes from the famous Ming Dynasty painter and poet Tang Yin (唐寅).
His Jiang Nan Nong Shi Tu (江南农事图) depicts farmers’ life in harvesting seasons at the southern part of China.
(四月江南农事兴。沤麻浸谷有常程。莫言娇细全无事。一夜缲车响到明)
Reading the poem directs a viewer through multiple locations on the painting simultaneously, going back and forth, zooming in and out….
Precedents
After exploring the multi-dimensions of Chinese traditional poetry and paintings, I looked into precedents of appropriating Calligraphy
by some Asian artists. The way they contextualize and personalize calligraphic characters is essentially inspiring to this project.
The Way, A Spiritual Path is created in 2005 by vietnamese artist Kim Hoa Tram.
He used a simple brushstroke to suggest the back of a monk climbing the mountain with a walking stick.
Calligraphy becomes part of the scenery while it flows like a stream from the mountain.
The way the poem is supposed to be read actually mimics the waterfall process.
The two most important characters,“man” （人）and “way”（道） are accentuated in darker ink to emphasize their importance.
The poem below was written around 220 B.C. by a wife who was missing her husband (汉苏伯玉之妻所作---盘中诗).
It was written as a round shape since roundness in China means “reunion”. And it’s supposed to be read from the center of the circle
to the outbound, meaning that her longing for her husband is growing.
It demonstrates poem-reading can be a spatial experience instead of a temporal one.
And the spatial choreography of “reading” is actually signifying its theme.
Artist Jaemin Lee designed this composition of Korean characters. Their orientation suggests some sort of spatial sequence
which can be integrated with the meaning/atmosphere of the poem, or the navigation of the painting.
This is the entire poem Chun Jiang Hua Yue Ye（春江花月夜） calligraphed by François Cheng.
Some character parts are stretched and exaggerated. The accumulation of these idiosyncratic parts jump out of the painting for attention.
Readers are thereby forced to look at the poem while looking through it.
Japanese typographer case. The first character combines dream with transience.
And the second character means “be away” expressed through its formal transition.
Algerian artist Rachid Koraïchi’s inscriptions use symbols from both ancient civilizations and his own imaginary ideograms
to create a unique visual language.
Koranic writings, mysticism and numerology are melted into a personal language to speak to the unknown.
Summary
Synthesizing the research, it can be said that Chinese traditional poetry is a multi-sensorial cross-scale aesthetic experience.
Any translation of Chinese ancient poetry into English or other languages that discards its original sonic and visual forms, is doomed to fail.
So the question becomes,
“what other forms can Chinese ancient poetry take to inspire a new audience?”
Learning from Chinese traditional paintings, modern visual/ sonic poetry, as well as VR films such as Dear Angelica,
the idea of Poeceptible: VR multi-sensorial calligraphic poetry started to emerge.
I chose VR as the medium for its relationship to the human body and its ability to render multi-scale non-linear visual/audio experiences.
It allows viewers to “walk” through the 3-dimensional visual elements as if they were truly immersed in the poem.
Poeceptible is also a chance for me to defamiliarize with, and re-appreciate the modernity of Chinese traditional arts.