Zhu MuLang
A contemporary abstract ink artist, known as “the maverick of the calligraphy world.”
My work begins where language ends.
Working with ink on traditional Xuan paper — a material
made from mulberry bark, unchanged for over a thousand
years — I investigate the moment when calligraphic energy
escapes the structure of the written character and becomes
pure presence on the page.
Each work is executed in a single session, driven by a
specific physical or meditative state. The marks cannot
be revised. What the brush records is not an image of a
state of mind but the state of mind itself — transferred
through the body into ink, into paper, into permanent form.
One breath cycle lasts 3.6 seconds in the Buddhist time
system. In that 3.6 seconds, 480 million *kṣaṇas* pass —
480 million moments of arising and ceasing.
I am interested in what remains when everything
unnecessary has been removed.
What remains is always the same:
breath, and the silence around it.
Working with ink on traditional Xuan paper — a material
made from mulberry bark, unchanged for over a thousand
years — I investigate the moment when calligraphic energy
escapes the structure of the written character and becomes
pure presence on the page.
Each work is executed in a single session, driven by a
specific physical or meditative state. The marks cannot
be revised. What the brush records is not an image of a
state of mind but the state of mind itself — transferred
through the body into ink, into paper, into permanent form.
One breath cycle lasts 3.6 seconds in the Buddhist time
system. In that 3.6 seconds, 480 million *kṣaṇas* pass —
480 million moments of arising and ceasing.
I am interested in what remains when everything
unnecessary has been removed.
What remains is always the same:
breath, and the silence around it.
