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Chinese calligraphic figures framed by 米字格 ‘mizige’ on scrolls of calligraphy paper Can you control the Chinese Character? Can you put one in a box? By putting one in a box, you can put more in more boxes. Take them into dark boxes. Where you can do the unspeakable to them. If you put them in a box, you are trying to define them any which way to comprehend them, but can you understand them? What are the dangers of putting the Chinese Character in a box? Can we box the spirit? Can we box qi? How can we create justice for the uncontainable soul? We are Chinese Characters. Forms you abstract to read. As characters, we create a system of meaning, propagate culture. At this moment, in the Mainland, people are being tracked in a Social Credit System - bounding boxes are summoned around the face. The government saves your face, so that you can too. It’s working. A layer of algorithmic justice can determine how the systems around you can treat you. Prevent or allow you from getting timely treatment in a hospital. Deny or deliver you transit tickets. Blacklist you, even. No doubt, it is changing your life. While at the moment, the system aims to only penalise those who don’t abide by innocuous things like playing loud music or eating in rapid transits, violating traffic rules such as jaywalking and red-light violations, I see a trajectory not unlike 1984. I am afraid that it entraps those who are systematically disadvantaged in another monolithic, universal system. At the moment, as a justice-bringing system, it creates a platform to dissuade from petty crime and unreliability - however, I am afraid that it sees sins in crime instead of evaluating justice based on need and circumstance. This is complex. I wonder whether removing human bias is a good idea, or possible, in the case of systems designed by humans. And synonymously, whether removing case by case human judgement can prove to be merciless. At the current moment, the Chinese government is implementing nation-wide facial recognition software that can track the motions of every citizen, and can catch them in socially unacceptable acts that affect their social score - something like a credit score. Interestingly, from colloquial and word of mouth inquiry, I have found that the Chinese are either apathetic or in general favour of a social score - saying that they feel like streets are safer. With these apparent results, I wonder - can we engineer good behaviour? Would that hijack people’s morality to manufacture moral behaviour without moral basis? Or am I just too Westernised and Libertarian to believe that moral progress can and should be hijacked in such a wide-scale, automated and authoritarian system? With my piece, I posit that us Chinese Characters - like the pictographic text that represent us and the artistic style of calligraphy - have too much ephemeral “character” to conform to the boxes that bind and aim to define us - in an act of using calligraphy to represent human form, I create portraits with the philosophy that we are imperfect citizens, and perhaps the standardisation and granularisation to create ‘perfect’ is flawed, and may serve to entrap us in our pasts and disable us from transmuting ourselves into freedom. I challenge that in every moment we live, we are summoning our qi to do the best we can. printed on Giclée Hahnemühle Bamboo If you are interested in a framed version of this piece, click here.

Chinese Characters

Reconnecting with nature, on a hike near Raglan, I collected ponga stalk, seabird feathers, and ferns. I laid out these large pieces of paper, and went off, playing with the elasticity and nature of these evolutionarily engineered forms, in what I would consider the most spiritually exhausting piece I've done recently. I'm so proud of this piece as it marks a relenting to the the organised chaos of biological forms besides me, as we always have as humans, though in this moment we are quite separate - culturally and in actuality. These prints are smaller than the actual piece - I will get around to taking a good quality picture soon! Ink and Decaying Wood painted with Native Foliage on Paperprinted on Giclée Hahnemühle Bamboo If you are interested in a framed version of this piece, click here.

Going Native

"Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul”. - Wassily Kandinsky This piece is a musical composition made visible. Calling upon Kaixi’s simultaneous practices in jazz singing, and abstract calligraphy, this medley is composed synesthetically. These fluid strokes carry watercolour pigment dimensionally, directly channelling the motion and dynamism of the hand and brush across the plane, generating an array of expressions that vary in timbre, some notes having a lilting sense of vibrato.printed on Giclée Hahnemühle Bamboo If you are interested in a framed version of this piece, click here.

Mind Melody

“I absolutely love this piece. This is a landscape where freedom rolls, eddies and picks up momentum. It was a blur to make it, and it felt so lovely and organic - fluffy, cloud like and benevolent, like a marshmallow. variation with every stroke fragile paper rips it’s a soft cushion." Palo Santo Char on Calligraphy Paperprinted on Giclée Hahnemühle Bamboo If you are interested in a framed version of this piece, click here.

Love Emanating

“As the threat of COVID loomed large, the start of my adult life was disrupted. Coming home felt like a defeat, and psychically messy, as I had spent my whole life trying to get out of New Zealand. I felt quite stuck, worthless. Lockdown was a traumatic time for me, and I felt like I had nowhere to go, and felt guilt for taking up space again in my parents’ home without a financial plan I ought to have by now. I’m hard on myself, and so were the voices and expectations around me. I was thinking of naming this piece ‘The Group Meeting’, after the disorienting dynamic of Zoom university. I made this piece in my Baba’s calligraphy room, where the ink was already potent and fluid. I took his brush and transmuted my mind's disarray onto the page. Before I knew it, I drew a map blind, foretelling what may happen from a point characterised by a mess of a time, mess of a mind, and how I journey into future to find peace. I had tied the bow with a premonition I have often - of a serene lake high in the mountains, soft silver in lilac haze. Sometimes this happens in my eyelid space before I sleep. Here I feel peace - like I would die here. I usually see this right after a vision of a sketchy alley - a Tokyo alleyway drawn with shifting charcoal. I haven’t seen this in a while. This piece I knew I was proud of immediately after making it. Living with it on my wall has been an uncannily peace-bringing presence, as the sense it makes for me is a model that scales from wake to sleep as it does from birth to death.” ‘Four Year Journey to Serenity Lake’ is a story of evolution, every stroke embodying emotion as they traverse time and space. The paper itself, sunbleached along its folds, creates 4 quadrants. In such a space, abstracted glyphs, from ampersands to Chinese radicals, are excavated like fragments from the breakdown of language. Afflicting with thorns and vines, and hints of gazes, the lines eventually carve a forward trajectory towards sense made outside of language. In the first quadrant, the mizige, also her logo, provides a place of entrance, a doorway into the space. In the left-to-right reading, simplicity is found after navigating chaotic intentions, communion of conflicting communication and opinions. In the second and third quadrants, the space lends itself as a plane described by Cartesian axes - certain strokes denote a wavering growth, a flaunting up of confidence. These trend lines loop in on themselves in a way that denotes time as illusory, - memory and spiritual progress being highly non linear, not easily bounded by the ideals of quantified rationality. Like a martial art, bold strokes blow back, convoluting the way forward from unseen, unknown forces. As you swipe your gaze, you move towards the clarity and stillness - a sleep, a rest, a micro death, a resignation for heaven. A leafy sapling symbolises a form of potential. In the final quadrant, a halo, or body of water floats above a fluid mountainous landscape, like a sky burial of a liquid cloud. Chinese Ink on Calligraphy Scrollprinted on Giclée Hahnemühle Bamboo If you are interested in a framed version of this piece, click here.

The Four Year Journey to Serenity Lake

#mood"This painting really accurately describes the depression I went through last year." - A friend of mine This crying cloud appears jellyfish-like in its paradoxical emergence - existing as 3 states of water. Peaking out like an iceberg, the water’s surface belies the torrent escaping underneath. Chinese Ink & Watercolour on Calligraphy Paperprinted on Giclée Hahnemühle Bamboo If you are interested in a framed version of this piece, click here.

Storm Submerged

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