# Project Description

Thousand-Character Text

ZHEN WU

Summary

Final work

College Central Saint Martins

Course BA (Hons) Fine Art

Graduation year 2025

This work integrates traditional Chinese calligraphy with modern exhibition Spaces through large-scale writing of the Heart Sutra, creating a visual language that transcends time and space. Writing extends from the wall to the floor, symbolizing the flow, diffusion and accumulation of thoughts and beliefs. The free brushstrokes of handwritten words not only retain the spirituality of Eastern culture but also evoke a meditative concern for the act of writing itself.

The work takes the "Heart Sutra" as its content, emphasizing the ontological propositions of emptiness, non-self, and transcendence of matter. At the same time, when these ancient characters are placed in the contemporary context, they are confronted with a highly materialized and digitalized world. Through the reenactment of traditional language, they question the contemporary society's forgetting and consumption of the meanings of "spirit", "faith" and "text". The characters on the wall are frozen like inscriptions on steles, while the words on the ground are scattered like scrolls, forming a visual metaphor for the inheritance of knowledge and the accumulation of culture.

This work also bears a certain "trace of action" : viewers can imagine the artist's body movement and mental concentration when writing. This kind of trace is transformed into spatial experience, enabling "writing" itself to transcend the meaning of words and become an action and an expression of a mode of existence.

Final work

Thousand-Character Text

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This work integrates traditional Chinese calligraphy with modern exhibition Spaces through large-scale writing of the Heart Sutra, creating a visual language that transcends time and space. Writing extends from the wall to the floor, symbolizing the flow, diffusion and accumul...

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