Textspace 2

[2021]

As a continuation of the Textspace project, which made one confront with a defamiliarised forms of inscription that do not allow access through readability, I continue to work on the similar lines, in this case by choosing an existing script that I personally am unfamiliar with. I decided to work with Asian scripts (chinese, japanese, korean, et all) which unlike latin or devnagiri, I am completely uneducated about. Without familiarising myself with any Alphabets or words from these languages, I decide to fill an entire sketchbook with shapes and forms that resemble what would be an Asian Script according to my own steretypical understanding, as I have a certain impression of what it might somewhat look like usually.

Everything is an image and everything is a language, but one’s inability to read something makes a thing a mere image, devoid of text. I would think of this project as a Painting excersie as I was just making some abstract marks on paper with strokes of black ink. The act of painting was then followed by a dinner session with my taiwanese and chinese friends who actually were able to spot many words and even sentences in what was drawn. We discussed for hours how the asian script is already so pictorial, the formal structure and its logic of inscription, and so on.

The drawings were then scanned using google translate app to be surprised to the fact how the machine vision could as well form many sentences and weird messages from supposedly arbitrary forms, generating absurd meanings and poetic provokations. Thus proving that all acts of mark making are unconsciously also producing a text, and they seek an observer, not necessarily human, who can breathe meaning into them.

Screenshots from the Google translation exercise: