World of Bamboo,
Source of Writing

Wang Dongling: The Bamboo Path
OCAT, Shenzhen
12.08.17 – 12.11.17

Translated by Duncan Hewitt

Hidden behind the bustling art market, outside the OCAT exhibition venue is a row of decorative thin bamboo plants, which creak in the wind. Thinking back to it now, they create a completely different atmosphere and vista to the hardy old giant mao bamboo inside the exhibition hall. The 201 trunks of mao bamboo do not create the impression I had expected, of a ‘forest of tall bamboo’, but rather conjure up the sense of a winding path leading to a secluded spot. The green bamboo stems are spread through the regular space of exhibition hall A, spaced out and arranged as though still growing in the original forest from which they came. In the front section of the space, two little paths leading to the centre of the bamboo grove have been laid out. They lead visitors towards a ‘clearing’ in the forest, where they can stop and look up, and attempt to decipher the odes to bamboo and other similar poems written on the trunks in the work Chaos Script.

Wang Dongling’s ‘chaos script’ is not really chaotic; it is ‘apparently chaotic but actually controlled’, going beyond the traditional rules for writing calligraphy.¹ Its legibility is reduced to a minimum, and after being internalised in the observer’s mind, it produces the effect of elongated, uninterrupted lines. The artist, who has constantly broken new ground in his calligraphic experiments, has long defined his calligraphy as contemporary art, and the abstract calligraphic works on the walls on two sides of exhibition hall B demonstrate his experimental approach and mood, where the lines and the black ink intermingle, and the words and images merge with each other. After passing more than a hundred small square elements of calligraphy, we come upon a huge piece of ‘chaos script’, which fills the whole surface of a wall, and consists of poems by Ji Kang and Ruan Ji, two of the ‘sages of the bamboo grove’. Here, characters sometimes overlap with other characters, lines with other lines, the brushstrokes piled on top of each other, the real and the imaginary combining with each other, to create an overarching visual effect, independent from the content. The convention of leaving a blank border around the work has also been dispensed with. Calligraphy has turned into a very relaxed type of abstract painting, becoming purer in the process.

The day I went to see the exhibition happened to be a leisurely Saturday afternoon. There were only four or five people there. Some were moving in and out of the bamboo stems, taking photos, or standing behind the thick bamboo trunks. People who had given up reading poems would walk a little, then stop again, so enchanted that they were unwilling to leave. Under the dim flickering rays of light, the bamboo seemed to be suspended in the air; it stood only lightly on the ground, its insubstantiality reminiscent of a forest swaying in the wind. Outside my line of vision the traces of the painstakingly applied ink gradually merged with the green bamboo; this variegated state conveyed a hint of the shape of the bamboo’s leaves. Traces of ink seemed to float out from the surface of the bamboo and merge with the ‘chaos script’ on the acrylic boards, filling the centre of the space. For a moment, real time seemed to stand still, while memories of the ancients came flooding into my mind.

See those secret inlets of the Qi,
where green bamboo is flourishing.
See those secret inlets of the Qi,
where green bamboo gives cover.
See those secret inlets of the Qi,
where green bamboo grows dense.²

The green bamboo grove, the dancing traces of ink, the white characters embedded in the space: amid the rhythmic poetry and words, people find themselves in a giant sensory space, wallowing in a man-made contemporary bamboo grove of words.

Last year and the year before, the Heart Sutra exhibition of chaos script at the Brooklyn Museum and the Imperial Ancestral Temple in Beijing brought the process of writing calligraphy into a public space: the calligrapher wore red shoes and socks, created his works ‘live’ on a huge canvas, on watercolour paper and on the floor, and the process of writing took place as the audience looked on. And The Bamboo Path has ‘symbolically privatised’ this kind of empty, neutral public space.³ The opening ceremony retained a performance element, but the entire exhibition hall was turned into an installation, inviting the audience to come in and experience the whole space, which took the form of a single work. The meandering path, the floating acrylic boards, the dim lighting, the calligraphy, even the presence of the visitors, all became part of the installation. On each bamboo trunk there was an individual section of poetry, such as a selection from the Book of Songs, or Su Shi’s famous line: ‘I can go without meat in my meal, yet I can’t live in a place without bamboo.’ Yet, in this space, the meaning of any poetic writing gradually became secondary. Here the vehicle for displaying calligraphy was no longer simply separate, individual works, but the space itself: the curator and the calligrapher had created a realm for walking, for looking, for wandering. As visitors walked along the bamboo path and gazed at the chaos script, they might find themselves happily enveloped in the peaceful mood of the bamboo grove, or discover, to their surprise and delight, the only legible poem among the chaos script: Lu Zhaolin’s ‘The Bamboo beside the Steps’ was written in the simple, classic calligraphic style of Han dynasty bamboo slips, enabling people’s memories to leap between ancient and modern times. In such an environment, the collision of bamboo and writing in connection with history and origins was inspiring.

Ever since the fourth century, when paper copying books became the main and most convenient medium for writing, we have used ink wash on paper. In The Bamboo Path, however, Wang Dongling’s writing flees from the calligraphic achievements of ink wash on paper, and returns to the ancient stylistic approach. Writing about bamboo, on bamboo, evokes the pure, classical ambiance of Qin and Han dynasty bamboo slips, as well as the kind of mental image – dating back to the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove – that bamboo evokes for Chinese people. And the territory of The Bamboo Path does not end there. When paper is replaced by natural bamboo stems, the more adhesive nie you ( literally, ‘pinch oil’, a thick coal-and-salt-based ink used for writing on bamboo in Anji, Zhejiang province ) is used as the ink. The curved surface of the bamboo trunks shatters the limitations of two-dimensional writing on a flat surface – the ‘chaos script’ goes right round the bamboo, covering all its sides. In this space, the order, continuity and direction of an overall image, traditionally made up of overlapping, interrupted and bifurcated lines, are completely superseded. The dry, thick nature of the nie you means that when it is used to write on the uneven bamboo trunks, it forms a thick grain and texture,⁴and requires a brand-new touch and perception – ‘using the wrist’s strength, and relying on the marks made by the brush when the ink runs out’.⁵ This displays both uninhibited adjustments to the style of writing and the strength of the calligrapher.

The chaos script on the bamboo consists of odes to bamboo written by successive generations, selected for their aesthetic interest. But once we have been led into this bamboo grove, the inner meaning and images associated with these words are abandoned somewhere in the recesses of our minds. The heavy, time-worn brushstrokes demonstrate an integral rhythm, between image and abstraction. From the overall visual effect of the lines, to the shift from a two-dimensional flat surface to a curved surface and three-dimensional space, calligraphy has again stripped off a layer of clothing that had been ossified by models of creation and exhibition, and has launched an assault on people’s experience of how to understand it. Reading has vanished, paper has also vanished – calligraphy has broken away from all kinds of historical and cultural connotations and the media associated with them. The chaos script in The Bamboo Path unearths a contemporary vitality from a forgotten culture long buried in the mists of time; from rules to no rules, people’s existence is demonstrated by the heart and hand working as one, the spirit and the rhythm being closely linked. What you write, what you write it with, are no longer important, because what you write is all about human spirit and emotions, and the natural instincts of the soul. And calligraphy is close to the earliest spirit of writing: calligraphy was originally a depiction made by a writer using lines, which embodied and expressed people’s consciousness and existence.

During this short journey of just twenty or thirty metres, the bamboo grove does not provoke any very startling sense of really being in such a place. The little path is merely a hint, its sense vague and indistinct – but the origins of calligraphy come flooding out from within it.

1. Wang Dongling, Iuanshu Chaos Script, Ink Studio, Beijing, 2016, p. 20.

2. Qi Ao, ‘Secrets of the Qi’, in Book of Songs: Airs of the States, Airs of the Wei, trans. Michael Farman <http://www.asiancha.com/content/view/1617/110/>.

3. Boris Groys, ‘Politics of Installation’, E-flux Journal, vol. 2 ( January 2009 ) <http://www.e-flux.com/journal/02/68504/politics-of-installation/>.

4. Wu Hung, Wang Dongling, ‘Bamboo Path’, The Art Newspaper, 2017.

5. Wang Dongling, ‘Writing On Bamboo’, The Art Newspaper, 2017.