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scatterd characters

散體千字文

Low reflective paint on Letter shaped resin
Variable size
2020

畳の上に低反射塗料を塗布した切り文字
サイズ可変
2020年

A group of brushstrokes lie scattered among tatami mats. Looking closely, one notices that they are from the Thousand Character Classic Chinese poem.
Thousands of characters, twisted and deconstructed into brush strokes, lie without overlapping on the mats, where they are moved by wind, and sympathetically interact with air flows and temperature changes that undulate inside and outside the building.

From the end of the 4th century to the beginning of the 5th, messengers from Baekje first brought collections of Chinese characters to Japan.
The Thousand Character Classic, one such collection, is a poetic verse that describes all things under the sun – astronomy, geography, politics, economics, society, history, ethics, and more. Even today, it is widely used drawn upon as a model for writing when teaching children Chinese characters.

The work imagines the "character upheaval" wrought by the Chinese characters, brought across the sea to an illiterate society.

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