Creative Writing Art | Philibert Kongtcheu
This unique and startling piece of creative writing art — a new form of artistic expression being pioneered by this author — is part of a yin-yang pair that exploits this Daoist dualistic concept to underscore the opposing dimensions of a “crisis,” both as a moment of great opportunity and a moment of perilous danger, as particularly underscored in the Chinese translation of the word: 危机.
The piece is also unique in that it comes across as a drawing that attempts to represent a face, but it is actually made entirely of beautified codified symbols, suggesting a highly compressed form of poetry. The breakdown of the word “crisis” as “cr-is-is,” backhandedly extracts that same ambiguity in the English expression of "crisis" with a recollection of the infamous "It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is." The effort to represent all of this as part of a head emphasizes the idea that "it is all in the head," with the pupil of one eye shaped as a calligraphic 危 wēi - that even though located in a bright environment of the eye, is in a dark color and relates to the darkness beyond its immediate surrounding light; it connects to its adjacent ear as the calligraphic 险xiǎn and thus represents the side that sees danger in a crisis. The pupil of the other eye, however, representing in bright color the calligraphically drawn 机, eschews the immediate darkness surrounding it in the eye to see the brightness on the horizon, connecting to the ear shaped as a calligraphic 会.
Read moreBeauty & the Beast | Philibert Kongtcheu
This unique and startling piece of creative writing art — a new form of artistic expression being pioneered by this author- is part of a yin-yang pair that exploits the Daoist dualistic concept to underscore the opposing dimensions of the beauty and the beast, as celebrated in French literature in Jeanine-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s La Belle et La Bête, and rendered in a multiplicity of English adaptations as Beauty and the Beast.
Like its pairing piece themed on the idea of crisis as danger and opportunity this piece is also unique in that it comes across as a drawing that attempts to represent a face, but is actually made entirely of beautified codified symbols, suggesting a highly compressed form of poetry. The representation of the beast, here the bright pupil of the dark eye, turns out, on close inspection, to be a borrowing of a confounding calligraphic spelling of the name of The Monkey King, 孙悟空Sun Wu Kong, hero of the Chinese Literary Classic Journey to the West, 西游记xiyouji, man of extraordinary power and brilliance.
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