Curatorial Statement

 

What is this conversation we are imagining between distinct writing traditions, a conversation that might seem never to have taken place on a grand cultural scale, despite the fact that there have always been individuals like ourselves, who have taken an interest in the respective other and its way of writing? In a multicultural region such as the Bay Area, there may well be ever more such individuals who wish to explore the way another culture thinks, speaks, prays, reads, writes. Would it not be the most natural thing in the world that two neighboring cultures would experience this interest in the other?

 

For example, that Iranian or Afghan Americans from a Muslim background who have an affinity with ICCNC, or run a restaurant or cafe in the Chinatown area, would be curious about the culture next door with its strange written signs, and that Chinese or Korean Americans from a Buddhist or Taoist background might want to know more about the culture of the friendly cafe owner who also has some kind of beautiful and mysterious writing hanging on the wall.

 

But in all likelihood this does not happen. We probably have enough on our hands, just in dealing with our own respective cultures, to take an active interest in, let alone become familiar with the literary and artistic expression of another tradition. So, if we think an intercultural conversation would be something worthwhile, quite often we must create special circumstances in which two or more members of the human family, who have hitherto remained largely ignorant about the other or others, suddenly find themselves placed in the same room, with a mediating voice encouraging them to speak.

 

This is what we have done here: brought diverse calligraphic traditions together in one place, to stand face to face and side by side, in hopes that they will have something to say to one another. So will it work? These radically distinct approaches to the written word: will they find some important common ground to speak about, or will we, the midwives and mediators of this conversation, have to witness an awkward silence punctuated by small talk, only to have each go its own way in the end, none the richer or wiser?

 

Upon consideration, one must surely come to the conclusion that the traditions represented here (chiefly those of the Islamic and East Asian cultures, though we have also been fortunate enough to display some examples of Tibetan calligraphy), though technically worlds apart, share one and the same origin and purpose. For why do we have 'beautiful writing' (the literal meaning of 'calligraphy'), if not that we might most appropriately express our beautiful thinking, that jewel in the crown of our humanity, that experience beyond all limits of language and culture? Whether it be the thought of laws and love divine and human, of the miracles of nature or those of man's invention: if there was writing to express that thought, people sought to beautify it, to do justice to the beauty of the message; and nowhere more than in the Asian and Islamic cultural spheres did they succeed in transforming the written word into art.

 

In both cases this transformation was inspired by revelations from the invisible world, of the laws governing this world, indeed all worlds. The Arabic script, though existing in one form or another long before the advent of Islam, achieved its rapid aesthetic ascent primarily in the wish to provide the most elegant vehicle for the message of the Qur'an. Since then, the calligraphy of the Islamic world has been adapted in a multitude of contexts, secular as well as religious: architecture, medical and scientific treatises, official edicts, poetry of all kinds, sometimes more, sometimes less for aesthetic purposes as art in its own right, in either case never losing - of necessity - either its basic function as the messenger of ideal or spiritual beauty, nor its basic striving toward formal beauty.

 

Chinese calligraphy has experienced a similar range of uses and, as with Islamic calligraphy, has its origins in the meeting of the visible and invisible worlds: the first Chinese writing described oracular events - conversations with the unseen world, the world of spirit and the spirits. Ever since, scribes have been inspired by the truths and ideas of their religious and philosophical traditions, whether Buddhist, Taoist, or Confucian, to cultivate writing as a discipline and art form, as well as by the beauty of nature and the trappings of worldly existence.

 

One context in which these two worlds have already met on a cultural scale, over a long period of time, should be mentioned here: the large community of Chinese Muslims, who have combined the necessity of reading and writing Arabic with the writing techniques and aesthetic sense of the country they have called their home for well over a thousand years. We are very lucky to have as our special guest in this exhibit one who has been engaged in this conversation for a very long time, Haji Noor Deen.

 

In the end we expect that the participants in this conversation will have a good deal to talk about, or perhaps simply sit together in the profound silence of shared and mutual understanding. The individual forms may be distinct from one another, might even seem to have no relationship to one another, but the world of meaning which they represent is a unity which is the birthright of all of us. Knowing this is, perhaps, the basis for any decent conversation.