ON LEGIBILITY

In a world that grows increasingly closer, and where the contamination ensuing from the incorporation of knowledge foreign to specific cultures is of extreme relevance to a future global understanding, there is a fundamental role reserved for artists and creators.

It is my belief that, in a relatively short time, the classifications of Chinese art, Oriental art or Western art will no further apply to some of the artistic expressions taking place in the contemporary now. As the Impressionists foresaw, a common understanding of the concepts of art is due to emerge.

In this framework of rupture with routine, the present exhibition has a natural and pedagogical place in a perspective of bridging the ethnical and the universal.

Lok Hong, a renowned artist of Macau who despite having been born elsewhere made Macau his second home, illustrate in this adoption the concept that a city is, above all, a place of affections.

A dilemma arises regarding the extraordinary art of Chinese calligraphy. That is: accessibility in its original sense is only possible for those who master Chinese writing and its precepts; fruition, for those who do not know its contents, is limited to the beauty of gesture.

But, moving in slightly deeper, I ask myself if it is truly a limitation or if - on the other hand- the intimate knowledge of the meaning hinders the emergence of the sign as an autonomous expression, linked only to aesthetic and formal characteristics that validate it as art in its deepest, and consequently its most universal, meaning.

The non-legibility that Lok Hong operates in this set of innovative works situates the general public, regardless of their knowledge of Chinese calligraphy, on a new common level: the indecipherability of the idea and the election of calligraphy as the root of this renewed expression that resorts to the traditional means of Chinese painting, i.e., paper and Shui-Mo ink.

Here, we stand before a re-interpretation of the ideogram as an aesthetic element par excellence - an essential condition for renovation, that every creator and artist must operate in himself so that his work may attain a true acknowledgement as art.

This exhibition is, after this few words that are but a measure of what remains to be said and thought, an important opening for all to meditate on the true concepts of legibility and art.

The answers dwell in the work and in every private reading of it.

António Conceição Junior