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The Inscription of the Times

Dates：16 NOV 2023—15 JAN 2024

Curator：SHIU Tzu-kuan

Consultant：HSIUNG Yi-ching

Artists：LIN Chen-han, CHI Kuan-ti, TSAI Cheng-han


This exhibition is the selected exhibition proposal for the 2023 Hengshan Calligraphy Art Center's Call for Exhibition Proposals, held by the Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts. The curator is Shiu Tzu-kuan, and the exhibition is titled "The Inscription of the Times."

In Chinese, inscriptions are sentences written for commemoration. Behind the inscription lays the romance of the artist and the story worth memorizing. The exhibition entitled “The Inscription of the Times” uses calligraphy to explore the variety of the inscriptions presented in the time and the space nowadays.

Calligraphy is a way to express emotion. In the Letter about a Stomachache, the renowned cursive calligrapher Zhang Xu (ca. 675-ca. 750) wrote about his pain while stomachache. In the Coral Post, Mi Fu (1051-1107) introduced his favorite collection to his friend. In his Cold Food Post, Su Shi (1037-1101) illustrated his frustration during the Cold Food Festival. These masterpieces of calligraphy are not only precious historical heritages but also the paradigms of beauty. For centuries, the calligraphy paradigms left by the antecessors have provided a way to express the beauty of writing, constructing a system and context to value the art. This enables the later generations to learn the system and establish their own styles, developing their characteristics and spiritual language of calligraphy.

While the ancients shared their thoughts and emotions of the times on the inscriptions, how do calligraphers nowadays articulate their inner feelings through their calligraphy? The exhibition focuses on the artists’ modern interpretations of inscriptions with classical calligraphy scripts in our time of a kaleidoscopic visual environment via advanced technology and various ideas, the artworks also contain the artists’ footprints in their respective phases of life.

All the touching feelings in life are worth remembering, as the inscriptions written by the ancients. The feelings expressed in the inscriptions persist through different times. For the artists of calligraphy, word still plays an important role through the times to express their emotions and writing is still a way to inscribe their own lives. Based on classical calligraphy, this exhibition showcases the works from the transcription of philological texts, the combination of daily life and seasonal scenes, and the embodiment of the artists’ memory. Employing profound classical techniques, the artists interweave the themes nowadays with their sense of humor. They reinterpret seemingly ordinary personal experiences within their works, offering a creative expression that recontextualizes classic literary traditions within the framework of modern life.