Sound (sheng)

Chiang Yee, a prolific writer and scholar of Chinese calligraphy, brushes in one continuous stroke the Chinese word sheng or "sound" composed of the elements for "ear" and "stone chimes." Like many calligraphers of the 20th century, Chiang was profoundly aware of calligraphy’s abstract and conceptual potential. While Chinese intellectuals have possessed an intuitive understanding of this phenomenon for over a thousand years, it was only in the 20th century, through contact with avant-garde notions from Europe and America, that it became fully articulated. Here, the Chinese character for "sound," both a visual embodiment of linguistic meaning and a signifier of the spoken word, is a fascinating example of the multivalence of Chinese writing. Chiang observed in his 1938 book Chinese Calligraphy:

Speech and writing are two organs of the same human impulse—the conveyance of thought: the one operating through hearing, the other through sight; the one by sound from mouth to ear, the other by form or image from hand to eye…Spoken words can discharge aesthetic "musical" significance…Written words can be formed to liberate visual beauties…"

Chiang’s extreme simplification of this complex character furthermore recalls the "spontaneous gesture" of action paintings by Franz Kline and other American abstract painters in the 1950s, while also transmitting an ineffable, transcendent spirituality.