For centuries in China, countless artists and writers have used the brush in order to transmit their ideas. It is inconceivable that Chinese culture could exist without the brush. In an illuminating essay by Ezra Pound and Ernst Fenellosa, called “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” (1936), the careful distinction is made between the pictographic sign and the ideograph. The first type of character evolved much earlier than the second. A pictogram has a direct one-to-one correspondence with an object or event. On the other hand, the ideograph is a more complex sign that alludes to human feelings within the context of ideas. The ideograph is more cultivated and more refined than the pictogram.
Modern Chinese calligraphy is based on writing the ideograph or, in some cases, on the interpretation that an artist brings to the ideograph. The first stroke of the brush by an artist is the essential one. It gives the indelible trace of the artist’s hand fused with a conceptual knowledge of time and space. The first stroke presents the quality and power of the artist’s ability to transmit meaning — not only in terms of what is written but in how the visual sign is expressed. Although well-known in the East, this concept often eludes the western spectator. By comparison, the Westerner is more accustomed to the representation of various forms of typography through print and through digital inventions now made possible with the computer. Today we tend to overlook the character of writing and the sensation of beauty by which the highest order of visual signs are received.
In the tradition of Eastern calligraphy, the manner in which an ideograph is created is considered as important as the literary meaning that is being expressed. In modern calligraphy, as the curator and scholar Yigao Zhang has made clear, the visual means of representation often outweighs the literary. In this sense, Zhang claims that “modern calligraphy belongs to modern life and a modern appreciation of art.” Whereas in the tradition of the ideograph, both visual and literary expressions ultimately come together, Modern calligraphy often forsakes the literary component entirely in order to focus on the energy of the mark as an implicit expression of the artist’s feeling. The literary concept is therefore more connected to the inventiveness and the visual acuity of the artist.
What constitutes a breakthrough in the earlier modern approaches to the art of the ideograph has happened in the work of Fung Ming-Chip. While spatial orientation has always been essential in ideographic calligraphy, Fung Ming-Chip often emphasizes the entire spatial field as opposed to the single modular space of the ideograph. His approach is directed to the spatial relationship between the individual units rather than necessarily emphasizing only the formal coherence of the strokes within each ideograph. This concept makes sense as one observes particular. For example, his series “Shadow Script” is a balance of both the strokes within each spatial unit and the larger spatial context that surrounds them. The page is presented in a subtle, yet distinct manner. The eye searches for the coherence and discovers what the media analyst Marshall McLuhan used to call “pattern recognition.” In contrast, Fung’s “Light Script” emphasizes only the larger spatial context, thereby leaving the individual spatial units as an absence, a grid floating in its own mysterious world — a world of writing that is perhaps more literal than literary.
Another example of Fung’s emphasis on the larger spatial context is found in his “Straight Line Scatter Script.” Here the elements within each spatial unit have been pulled apart, suggesting a scattering of the elements within each unit as the title of this series suggests. This approach is closer to the American concept of “all-over painting” as practiced by the so-called “action painters” of the fifties; but Fung’s sophistication in making this surface into a literal reality exceeds the formal style often associated with the Americans. If anything, Fung is more conceptual in his approach, more disinterested in the content as a pretext for the writing, and given instead to a kind of inventive energy that focuses primarily on the larger spatial context in which the ideographs reside.
Fung Ming-Chip is an explorer. His writing is constantly seeking to open up and to validate new approaches to the meaning of the ideograph. In this sense, he is broadening our awareness of visual signs by making us aware of the ground in which language exists. Like the German painter Gerhard Richter, Fung retains his disinterestedness in the content of the brushwork in order to discover new forms — forms that are possessed by an indirectness that dissolve as we approach them, that enter into the entirety of the page, thus giving us a sensory relationship both to the text as image and to the image as text. Fung Ming-chip is fundamentally an abstract artist who continues to invent new visual terms for how language may exist within the absence of the sign and how this absence can be a profound vehicle for transmitting deeply intuited feelings
Robert C. Morgan
New York City
March 1999