Painted Calligraphy Series: Text as Texture

Writing Becomes a Painted Field

In the Painted Calligraphy series, layered writing accumulates until it becomes a painted field. Poems, classical texts and philosophical reflections are written over one another, leaving characters partly legible within a denser visual structure. He uses the term 绘书 (huìshū) for this approach, which brings Chinese calligraphy into contemporary painting.

The series draws on the artist’s study of Chinese painting and calligraphy and doctoral research into the development of xieyi painting (写意画). The written text remains the starting material, even as repetition makes it harder to read.

The Origin: A Beijing Memory

Zettl traces the idea to a memory from his student years at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in the late 1970s. As he recalls it, a classmate, Gǔ, reused sheets for daily calligraphy practice because she could not afford new paper.

She began with diluted ink and wrote over the same sheet in progressively darker tones. Layers of characters gradually formed a dense black surface. When she gave him one of these sheets, its accumulated marks suggested possibilities beyond the practice exercise. He associated it with Arnulf Rainer’s overpaintings, while recognising its origin in the repeated work of learning calligraphy.

Monochrome Series: Black Zen

In the monochrome works, repeated characters form dense fields broken by narrow openings. The eye moves between individual strokes and the larger pattern they make. Differences in ink density allow earlier layers to remain visible beneath later writing; in places, white passages still suggest the spacing of columns.

Monochrome Painted Calligraphy Video

Repeated writing in practice: the making of a painted calligraphy.

Colour and Layered Writing

The colour works make the layers easier to distinguish in some passages and harder in others. Turquoise strokes gather into dark clusters, red overlaps black, and green moves towards yellow across the sheet. The works use coloured inks and, in parts of the wider series, oil paint on canvas. Poems and short texts provide a repeated structure through which the colours can build.

Repetition and Attention

Repetition gives the series its duration: each new passage partly covers what came before. The finished image retains traces of that sequence, even where words become unreadable. The artist discusses this working process in Why I Practice Painted Calligraphy; the wider context appears in Asian Art Essays.