calligraphy
- Museum number
- 2001,1012,0.1
- Title
- Object: The Letter
- Description
-
Large vertical panel made of paper, with calligraphy on black ink spilling over a red border. The words the piece contains translate as 'I have arrived!', a slogan from Mao's Great Leap Forward campaign of 1958, which involved mobilizing the masses in the hope that China would quickly catch up with the developed world.
- Production date
- 2001
- Dimensions
-
Height: 179.30 centimetres
-
Width: 97 centimetres
- Curator's comments
- Barrass 2002:
In 1996 Zhang Dawo produced a small volume entitled 'Love Letters'. He began by taking a book of the beautiful writing paper produced at Rong Bao Zhai, the fine art shop in Beijing. In such books, printed on each page is a vertical rectangle outlined in red, with nicely proportioned margins around it. In traditional calligraphy, legible and meaningful Chinese characters are aligned in regular columns within these rectangular panels, but the artist has allowed his calligraphy to stray beyond the border of each panel. In doing so, he wanted to convey the message that love knows no bounds, but at the same time to imply that the art of calligraphy itself needs to break free from the constraints of tradition. This idea was made even more dramatically in this piece, produced in 2001. Unlike the previous volume, which was painted with bold, unrecognizable forms on the paper, Zhang Dawo has used an old slogan in a new context, celebrating the fact that China is stepping out into the world at the beginning of the new millennium. As the artist himself puts it, 'The peony is now stretching out beyond the garden fence'.
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
Exhibited:
BM, OAII; Brushes with Surprise, Jan 2002
- Acquisition date
- 2001
- Department
- Asia
- Registration number
- 2001,1012,0.1
- Additional IDs
-
Asia painting number: Ch.Ptg.Add.734 (Chinese Painting Additional Number)
