Selection of gestural calligraphy based on traditional Chinese techniques and Western painting
Asemic writing
Asemic calligraphy [1] is a series of works that make the viewer think at first glance that it is Chinese calligraphy. Although the works are based on traditional Chinese calligraphy, they are arbitrary compositions that follow other criteria.
Asemic Calligraphy is an ongoing series with partly different emphases. The examples below show the general trends. You will find the most recent works at the top of the gallery.
Some of the works are offered at artmajeur
Blog posts on these and similar topics are posted regularly on https://zettl.blog/journal/
footnotes:
wikipedia definition: Asemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing. The word asemic means “having no specific semantic content”, or “without the smallest unit of meaning”. With the non-specificity of asemic writing, there comes a vacuum of meaning. It is left for the reader to fill in and interpret. All of this is similar to the way one would deduce meaning from an abstract work of art. Where asemic writing distinguishes itself among traditions of abstract art is in the asemic author’s use of the gestural constraint. And the retention of physical characteristics of writing such as lines and symbols.
Asemic writing is a hybrid art form that fuses text and image into unity and then sets it free to arbitrary subjective interpretations. It may be compared to free writing or writing for its own sake, instead of writing to produce verbal context. The open nature of asemic works allows for meaning to occur across the linguistic understanding. Asemic texts may be “read” in a similar fashion regardless of the reader’s natural language. Multiple meanings for the same symbolism are another possibility for an asemic work, that is, asemic writing can be polysemantic or have zero meaning, infinite meanings, or its meaning can evolve over time. Asemic works leave the reader to decide how to translate and explore an asemic text; in this sense, the reader becomes a co-creator of the asemic work.