Course Introduction and Islamic Calligraphy — Foundations

The Course’s Central Question

“Calligraphy to Conceptual Art: Text as an Image in Islamic and East Asian Visual Arts and Beyond” is a studio-lecture hybrid course offered at Renison University College, University of Waterloo. Its governing question is deceptively simple: what happens when writing stops being read and starts being seen? The course traces this transformation across three major traditions — Islamic calligraphy, East Asian calligraphy, and Western conceptual art — and argues that the question has never been more alive than it is in contemporary art practice.

The instructor, Soheila Kolahdouz Esfahani, frames the course as a corrective to a Eurocentric art education. Having completed her own Bachelor of Fine Arts at Waterloo and later finding what she describes as a notable absence of non-Western artistic traditions in her training, she designed the course specifically to open space for “other ways of thinking about art.” The result is a course that is neither a history class nor a traditional calligraphy class. Students are not expected to become calligraphers — mastering any calligraphic tradition takes years of disciplined practice. What the course offers instead is a critical and practical encounter with cultures in which text is the primary language of art-making.

Professor Esfahani illustrates this concept with a photograph she took in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia: the Tim Hortons logo rendered in Arabic script. Most viewers who cannot read Arabic will still recognize the familiar circular logo form and the color coding — the text has become an image, legible even without being readable. This everyday example anchors the course’s most sophisticated theoretical claim: that the boundary between writing and image is never absolute, and that artists across cultures and centuries have exploited this ambiguity with extraordinary creativity.

The course is structured in three major movements. The first five weeks concentrate on Islamic calligraphy — its history, its scripts, its spiritual underpinning, and its contemporary transformations. Weeks six through eight shift to East Asian calligraphy, with emphasis on Chinese ink traditions and Japanese calligraphy. The final weeks take up conceptual art in the Western tradition, examining how artists from the 1960s onward have placed language — word, sentence, instruction, label — at the center of their practice. The three movements are not simply placed side by side: the course persistently asks how they illuminate one another, and what it means that artists in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries increasingly move across all three.

Arabic Script: Structure, History, and Principles

The first required reading is Sheila S. Blair’s introductory chapter to her comprehensive volume Islamic Calligraphy (Edinburgh University Press, 2006). Blair is one of the foremost scholars of Islamic art in the English-speaking world, and her chapter “Arabic Script: Its Role and Principles” provides the technical foundation for the first half of the course.

Arabic is written from right to left on the page, and its cursive nature is not a stylistic choice but an intrinsic feature of the script: most letters connect to the letter that follows them within a word. This continuity of the pen stroke — the fact that a word is, in many cases, drawn rather than assembled letter by letter — gives Arabic calligraphy much of its expressive dynamism. The stroke of the reed pen or the qalam is not interrupted; it flows continuously, and the calligrapher’s task is to modulate that flow with exquisite control.

The Arabic alphabet has twenty-eight consonantal letters. Vowels are indicated by small diacritical marks placed above or below the line of consonants, and in many calligraphic contexts — particularly in architectural inscriptions — these marks are omitted, making the text both more visually clean and more demanding of the informed reader. The letters group into families based on their basic shapes, with dots added above or below to differentiate letters that share the same underlying form.

Blair emphasizes that from very early in Islamic history, script was understood as something far more than a practical tool for communication. The Arabic language was the language in which the Qur’an was revealed, and the text of the Qur’an was understood to be the direct speech of God. This theological conviction gave Arabic letters a sacredness that had no parallel in Western European attitudes toward writing. Copying the Qur’an was a spiritual act, and rendering its verses beautifully was a form of worship. The calligrapher who devoted a lifetime to perfecting the forms of the letters was not simply an artisan but a practitioner of a sacred discipline.

The Spiritual Dimension of Islamic Calligraphy

The intimate relationship between Islamic calligraphy and religious devotion is central to the course’s argument and recurs throughout the semester. In Islam, the visual representation of God, the Prophet, and sacred figures was historically discouraged in many traditions, and this created a distinctive situation: the arts of the beautiful, which in medieval Europe channeled themselves primarily through figurative painting and sculpture of holy persons, in the Islamic world found their primary vehicle in calligraphy and geometric ornament.

The very first word revealed to the Prophet Muhammad was, according to tradition, the imperative iqra’ — “read” or “recite.” From the earliest moment of revelation, language — and by extension writing — was understood as the medium through which the divine makes itself known in the world. The Arabic word for the Qur’an itself comes from the root meaning “to recite” or “to read aloud,” and early Islam understood the Qur’an primarily as a spoken and recited text. But as the new faith spread across the vast territories of the Arabian peninsula, the Levant, Persia, and North Africa, the written text became essential for the transmission and preservation of revelation, and the visual appearance of that written text took on enormous sacred significance.

The tradition of ijazah — the formal authorization granted by a master calligrapher to a student who has demonstrated sufficient mastery — carried an authority analogous to the chain of transmission (isnad) in Islamic hadith scholarship. Just as a statement attributed to the Prophet could only be trusted if its chain of transmission back to a reliable companion was unbroken, so the authority of a calligraphic style was guaranteed by an unbroken lineage of masters. This emphasis on transmission and lineage is characteristic of Islamic knowledge culture more broadly and gives Islamic calligraphy a depth of historical continuity that distinguishes it from most Western art practices.

The calligrapher in the Islamic tradition occupies a position of considerable prestige. The great calligraphers of history — Ibn Muqla, Ibn al-Bawwab, Yaqut al-Musta’simi — were remembered by name in ways that painters rarely were. Calligraphy was taught through a master-apprentice relationship in which the student spent years copying and re-copying the master’s examples before developing any individual style. The physical training required was immense: control of the breath, the posture, the wrist, and the distribution of ink across the nib all had to be integrated into a single, coordinated practice. The goal was not mere technical accuracy but the internalization of beauty itself — a condition in which the calligrapher’s body and the letters became unified.

Materials and the Practice of Calligraphy

The materials of Islamic calligraphy are modest and precise. The qalam, cut from a dried reed, is the primary instrument. Its angled nib creates the essential characteristic of Arabic script: strokes vary in width depending on the direction of the pen’s movement, so that a thick downstroke and a thin crossstroke are produced by the same tool in the same gesture. The ink — traditionally carbon-based, blended to precise viscosities — must flow freely but not bleed; the paper or vellum must accept the stroke without feathering. The preparation of materials was as important as the act of writing, and classical manuals devoted detailed attention to the making of the qalam, the preparation of ink, and the correct sizing of paper.

For the course’s studio practice, students work with calligraphy markers — tools with chisel-tip nibs that approximate the thick-and-thin variation of the reed pen — and with tracing paper over template sheets of the Thuluth alphabet. The instructor provides printed practice sheets and recommends working at letter size appropriate to the nib width, since calligraphic proportion depends on the relationship between the instrument and the letter dimensions.

Scripts and Styles of Arabic Calligraphy

The Six Classical Scripts

Islamic calligraphy encompasses a remarkable range of distinct scripts, each with its own aesthetic character, historical development, and characteristic uses. It is important to understand that in the Arabic tradition these scripts are not merely stylistic variations the way different fonts are in Western typography. Each script has its own proportional system, its own physical demands, its own historical context of use, and its own associations of prestige and appropriateness. Choosing to write a Qur’anic verse in Kufic rather than Naskh is not simply a typographic choice — it is a decision with historical, aesthetic, and sometimes political implications. The classical Arabic calligraphic tradition recognized six major scripts — the aqlam al-sitta or “six pens” — codified by the great Abbasid calligrapher Ibn Muqla in the tenth century. Each script was characterized by precise proportional relationships between the letters, defined in terms of the basic rhombic dot made by the tip of the qalam.

Beyond the six classical scripts, the Islamic world produced an array of regional and specialized scripts. Nastaliq, developed in Persia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, is widely regarded as the most aesthetically refined of all calligraphic scripts. Its name combines “Naskh” and “Taliq” (the earlier Persian chancery script from which it partly derives), and it is characterized by its distinctive diagonal flow, with words appearing to cascade downward from right to left across the page. Nastaliq became the dominant script for Persian poetry and literary manuscripts and is still the standard for Persian, Urdu, and related literary traditions.

Diwani is another important script, developed in the Ottoman chancery during the sixteenth century for official imperial documents. Its extreme elegance, complex interlacing, and compressed letterforms made it both beautiful and difficult to forge — a practical consideration for state documents.

Proportional Systems: The Science of Beautiful Letters

What distinguished the great calligraphers of the classical tradition from mere copyists was their mastery of a mathematical system of proportions. Ibn Muqla (died 940 CE), the founder of the classical system, developed a theory in which every letter could be defined in terms of its relationship to the basic rhombic dot — the mark made by placing the qalam flat against the paper and pressing lightly. The height of the alif (the first letter), the diameter of circles inscribed within letterforms, and the length of horizontal extensions were all defined in multiples of this fundamental unit.

This proportional system meant that a trained calligrapher could immediately identify whether a piece of writing conformed to the correct proportions, regardless of its size. It also meant that calligraphy was understood as a form of geometric knowledge — a discipline in which aesthetic beauty and mathematical precision were inseparable. This fusion of geometry and aesthetics is closely related to the broader Islamic tradition of geometric ornament, in which infinitely extendable tile patterns, arabesque vegetal scrolls, and muqarnas vaulting in architecture all express a kind of sacred mathematics.

Islamic Calligraphy in Architectural Space

One of the most distinctive and visually spectacular manifestations of Islamic calligraphy is its role in architecture. From the earliest mosques of the seventh century onward, inscribed text played a structural role in the visual program of Islamic sacred spaces. The interiors of mosques, shrines, and tombs were covered with inscriptions — Qur’anic verses, divine names, prayers — rendered in tile mosaic, carved plaster, cut marble, and painted glazed brick.

The placement of text was not incidental but carefully designed. A band of Qur’anic inscription running around the interior of a mosque dome creates a visual horizon that separates the earthly space below from the heavenly space above. An inscription above a mihrab (the niche indicating the direction of prayer) frames the devotional act of the worshipper. In many of the greatest monuments of Islamic architecture — the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the mosques and madrasas of Samarkand, the Alhambra in Granada, the imperial mosques of Istanbul — calligraphy is as architecturally significant as the structural elements themselves.

The relationship between calligraphy and Islamic architecture also reveals a crucial aspect of the tradition’s logic: text in Islamic sacred space is intended to be experienced even when it cannot be fully read. A visitor to a great mosque may be illiterate in Arabic, or may encounter inscriptions at too great a height or distance to be read letter by letter. This does not diminish their effect. The rhythm, the visual weight, the interplay of dark and light, the way the inscription frames a doorway or crowns a dome — these are aesthetic experiences that do not require lexical decoding. Islamic calligraphy in architecture functions simultaneously as text (for those who can read it) and as pure visual form (for everyone who encounters it). This dual function is one of the most sophisticated aspects of the tradition and one of the most useful conceptual tools for the broader course.

Islamic Calligraphy in Contemporary Art

The Contemporary Encounter with Tradition

The transition from classical calligraphy to contemporary art is not a rupture but a transformation. From the mid-twentieth century onward, artists trained in or deeply familiar with Arabic and Islamic calligraphic traditions began to ask what the vocabulary of calligraphy could mean outside the mosque, outside the manuscript, outside the traditional master-apprentice context of transmission. The resulting body of work is enormously varied: some artists retain legible text but displace it from its expected context; some push letters toward complete abstraction while retaining their visual energy; some use the act of calligraphic inscription as a form of bodily performance; some engage with the political and postcolonial dimensions of script and language identity.

Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-American artist whose work has become one of the defining bodies of contemporary calligraphic art. Born in Iran in 1957, she left for the United States to study before the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and did not return to Iran until 1990. The encounter with a radically transformed homeland became the catalyst for a series of photographic and video works that have made her internationally celebrated.

In her Women of Allah series (1993–97), Neshat photographed Iranian women — including herself — with Arabic or Persian text inscribed on their faces, hands, and feet. The text, drawn from Persian poetry and revolutionary literature, covers the exposed skin that emerges from the chador (the full-length black veil). The calligraphic inscription does not simply decorate the body; it makes the body a text. The images invite multiple and conflicting readings: the script that covers a face simultaneously marks it, aestheticizes it, and erases its individuality. For a Western viewer who cannot read Persian, the letters function primarily as image — beautiful, graphic, mysterious. For a viewer who reads Persian, the poetic content layers additional meaning onto an already complex visual statement.

Jamelie Hassan

Jamelie Hassan is a Canadian artist of Lebanese origin whose work engages with Arabic script, language politics, and postcolonial identity. Her practice consistently questions what it means for a community to inhabit more than one language — and the cultural losses and gains entailed by that condition. Hassan’s installations often place Arabic text in contexts where English is expected, creating a productive disorientation for viewers who cannot read Arabic and a flash of recognition for those who can.

Hassan’s work connects the course’s Islamic calligraphy unit to questions that are specific to the Canadian context: what does it mean to live in a country in which Arabic — and the cultural heritage it carries — is invisible to most of the dominant culture? Her practice can be understood as an act of cultural inscription, making visible within the Canadian public sphere a heritage that official culture has historically treated as foreign. This concern with visibility and belonging connects the aesthetics of Arabic calligraphy to broader conversations about multiculturalism, immigration, and the politics of language.

The Hurufiyya Movement

Beyond individual artists, the course’s contemporary art component draws on a broader movement in Arab visual culture: Hurufiyya, or letterism. Artists associated with this movement — which flourished in Iraq, Egypt, Sudan, and elsewhere from the 1950s onward — sought to develop a distinctively Arab modernism by using Arabic letterforms as the foundation of abstract painting. Rather than importing the forms of French or American abstraction wholesale, Hurufiyya artists argued that the Arabic letter was already an abstract form of extraordinary beauty and expressive range, and that it could serve as the basis for a visual language that was simultaneously modern and rooted in cultural tradition.

Taking a Line for a Walk — From the Abbasid Caliphate to Contemporary Art

Laura U. Marks and the History of the Abstract Line

The Week 4 reading, Laura U. Marks’s “Taking a Line for a Walk, from the Abbasid Caliphate to Vector Graphics” (Third Text, 2009), offers a theoretically ambitious argument: that there is a genuine historical and aesthetic genealogy connecting Islamic calligraphy, European abstract painting, and contemporary computer graphics. Marks uses the figure of the “dreaming line” — first articulated by the poet Henri Michaux in relation to the work of Paul Klee — to trace a continuous history of the abstract line from ninth-century Islamic manuscript culture through to contemporary digital art.

Marks’s argument begins with a key tension within Islamic calligraphy: the philosophical and theological debate between the point (fixed, stable, the originating unit of all letterforms) and the line (dynamic, performative, the trace left by the point in motion). Drawing on the philosopher Wassily Kandinsky’s Point and Line to Plane (1926), she notes that in European modernism, the same tension was at issue: Klee wanted to “take a line for a walk,” to let the line be “a line for the pleasure of being a line,” unsubordinated to the task of depiction. But Marks argues that the abstract line had already been dreaming extravagantly in Islamic art since the ninth century — that the sinuous arabesque, the free-flowing loops of Nastaliq, and the ornamental interlace of Islamic geometric art had already explored a non-representational line with extraordinary sophistication.

Marks further argues that the history of Islamic calligraphy was shaped by the same tension between point and line that would later animate debates in computer graphics about pixel versus vector. In vector graphics — used in software like Adobe Illustrator and in early computer arcade games — a line is rendered by connecting points in real time; the line has only a momentary existence as a connection in motion. In raster (pixel-based) graphics, the line is dissolved into a grid of fixed points. The standardization of digital imaging around the raster model, Marks suggests, echoes the historical moment in which Islamic calligraphers sought to discipline the free-moving line within a proportional system of fixed rhombic dots — Ibn Muqla’s great tenth-century codification of the six scripts.

This argument positions Islamic calligraphy not as a historical curiosity but as a living predecessor to contemporary art and media culture — a tradition that has already worked through problems that Western art and digital technology are only now encountering.

Nja Mahdaoui: Between East and West

The reading by Martina Corgnati on Nja Mahdaoui (“Between East and West,” in Nja Mahdaoui: Jafr. The Alchemy of Signs, Skira, 2015) introduces the Tunisian artist whose work is one of the most important examples of calligraphic abstraction in contemporary art. Mahdaoui, born in Tunis in 1937, was trained in both Islamic traditional arts and European modernism. His mature work synthesizes these two formations into a highly distinctive visual language in which Arabic letterforms are transformed into abstract marks — recognizably calligraphic in their energy and movement but deliberately non-lexical.

Mahdaoui’s concept of jafr — an ancient Islamic science of interpreting the occult meanings of letters and numbers — gives the theoretical framework for his practice. For Mahdaoui, the Arabic letter is not merely a unit of language but a sign charged with mystical energy. His paintings and installations present swirling fields of letter-like forms that are simultaneously decorative, gestural, and spiritually resonant. The letters do not spell out words; they generate a visual music analogous to Sufi chant or the recitation of the divine names. Corgnati describes this as an “alchemy of signs” — a transformation of the raw material of script into something beyond semantics.

Mahdaoui’s position between Tunisia and Europe, between Arabic tradition and Western modernism, makes his work an exemplary case of what the course calls the East-West encounter in calligraphic art. His work is neither a simple continuation of tradition nor a wholesale adoption of European abstract expressionism; it is a genuine synthesis that belongs fully to neither world and creates a third space of its own.

Japanese Calligraphy Workshop — Shodo

The Tradition of Shodo

Week 5 departs from the lecture format entirely: the class session is given over to a workshop with Noriko Maeda, a Waterloo-based Japanese calligrapher of international renown. Maeda teaches both at community level through Renison University College’s continuing education programs and at an internationally recognized professional level. The workshop is considered by the instructor one of the most important sessions of the entire term, and students are strongly encouraged to attend synchronously rather than accessing the recording after the fact — the live, embodied dimension of the calligraphic practice is not fully transmissible through video. This workshop introduces students to shodo — the Japanese art of calligraphy — through direct practice.

Japanese calligraphy is practiced with a brush — the fude — held vertically over the paper, unlike the angled pen of Arabic calligraphy. The ink, ground from an inkstick (sumi) on an inkstone (suzuri) with water, produces a range of tonalities from deep black to pale gray depending on the concentration of ink and the speed of the brush. The absorbent paper, washi, accepts the ink immediately and without the possibility of correction — every stroke is permanent.

Japanese calligraphy inherits both the Chinese script tradition and a set of aesthetic values specific to Japanese culture. The five major scripts used in Japanese calligraphy — kaisho (block style), gyosho (semi-cursive), sosho (grass style), tensho (seal style), and reisho (clerical style) — correspond broadly to the range of styles from highly legible to highly abstract. In practice, Japanese calligraphers often work primarily in gyosho or sosho, where the gestural qualities of the brush are most evident and where individual aesthetic expression is most possible within the inherited formal constraints.

Noriko Maeda’s teaching emphasizes the bodily dimension of the practice: the correct alignment of the body in relation to the paper, the use of the whole arm rather than just the wrist, the cultivation of a still mind before beginning to write. These elements of the practice connect directly to Zen Buddhist influences on Japanese calligraphy — the idea that a single brushstroke can express a moment of pure awareness.

The concept of ensō — the Zen circle drawn in a single, spontaneous brushstroke — epitomizes this dimension of Japanese calligraphy. An ensō is not a drawing of a circle but the trace of a single unified gesture; it records the state of the calligrapher’s mind and body at the moment of its making. The ensō is one of the most widely reproduced images in Japanese art, partly because it is so simple — anyone can understand it visually, regardless of whether they read Japanese — and partly because the range of expression it accommodates is extraordinary. A perfect, closed circle, a broken circle, a thick-brushed circle, a barely-there circle — each tells a different story about the moment of its making.

Chinese Ink Art and the Written Word — East Asian Calligraphy

Maxwell K. Hearn and Ink Art

The reading for Week 6 is Maxwell K. Hearn’s essay “The Written Word,” from the catalogue Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013). The catalogue accompanied a landmark exhibition at the Met that brought together historical Chinese calligraphy and contemporary Chinese ink-based art, arguing for the continuity of a tradition that might seem to have been interrupted by the Cultural Revolution and the subsequent globalization of Chinese art. Hearn was for many years the Douglas Dillon Curator of Chinese Art at the Metropolitan Museum, and his essay situates contemporary Chinese ink art within the long history of Chinese calligraphy and painting.

The essay establishes a fundamental point: in the Chinese tradition, calligraphy and painting were not distinct arts but aspects of a single continuum. The same brush, the same ink, the same paper, and the same trained hand produced both. More profoundly, both were understood as traces of the artist’s inner state — not representations of external reality but expressions of character, cultivation, and spiritual attainment. The wenren or literati tradition, which dominated Chinese elite culture from the Song dynasty onward, held that the expressive quality of brushwork was the highest criterion for judging both calligraphy and painting.

Hearn’s essay emphasizes the concept of fang gu or “following the ancient” — the Chinese calligraphic practice of studying and copying earlier masters not as mere imitation but as a form of creative dialogue. A calligrapher who masters the canonical style of Wang Xizhi (the fourth-century master whose Lanting Xu, the Preface to the Orchid Pavilion Gathering, is considered the supreme achievement of Chinese calligraphy) does not simply reproduce it but internalizes a conversation with history. Contemporary Chinese artists working with ink are, in this sense, participating in a tradition that has always understood itself as a conversation across time.

Hearn traces how contemporary Chinese artists have engaged with this tradition in a changed world. Artists like Xu Bing and Gu Wenda have created works that reference Chinese calligraphy while deliberately undermining its legibility — Xu Bing’s invented characters look like Chinese calligraphy but cannot be read; Gu Wenda combines Chinese, English, Arabic, and Hindi scripts in monumental installations that celebrate and question the power of writing as an international phenomenon.

Yuehping Yen: Body-Person Engineering Through Ink and Brush

The reading by Yuehping Yen — “Body-person Engineering through Ink and Brush,” from Calligraphy and Power in Contemporary Chinese Society (Routledge, 2004) — addresses a different dimension of East Asian calligraphy: its role as a technology of the self and as a tool of social and political power in modern and contemporary China.

Yen’s argument centers on the concept she calls “body-person engineering” — the idea that the practice of calligraphy in China has historically been understood as a means of forming a particular kind of person. The discipline of brushwork, the memorization of classical models, the cultivation of stillness and concentration — all these were understood not merely as aesthetic training but as moral formation. The brush-wielding body was the civilized body; calligraphic competence was evidence of cultivation.

In the context of contemporary China, Yen examines how calligraphy continues to function as a marker of cultural capital and political identity, and how political leaders have used their public calligraphic practice to signal their relationship to Chinese tradition. She also traces how calligraphy education in schools has been subject to political pressures and how the valorization of particular scripts and masters has shifted with changing political priorities. The essay introduces students to calligraphy not merely as an aesthetic phenomenon but as a practice thoroughly embedded in relations of power, authority, and cultural memory.

East Asian Calligraphy in Contemporary Art — The Asian Dimensions of Postwar Abstraction

Bert Winther-Tamaki and the Pacific Exchange

The reading for Week 7 is Bert Winther-Tamaki’s essay “The Asian Dimensions of Postwar Abstract Art: Calligraphy and Metaphysics,” from the catalogue The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1969 (Guggenheim Museum, 2009). Winther-Tamaki addresses one of the most significant and underexamined chapters in the history of twentieth-century art: the encounter between American Abstract Expressionism and Japanese calligraphy and philosophy in the postwar decades.

The essay’s central argument is that the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of East Asian calligraphy — above all its emphasis on the direct expression of inner experience through brushwork, and its Zen philosophical underpinning — were deeply attractive to American abstract painters seeking an alternative to the rational, formalist criticism championed by Clement Greenberg. Artists like Franz Kline, whose large-scale black-and-white abstractions have an obvious visual kinship with Japanese calligraphy, and Mark Tobey, whose “white writing” drew explicitly on his study of Chinese calligraphy, were only the most visible participants in a broader transactional encounter.

On the Japanese side, Winther-Tamaki examines the postwar Bokujinkai group of Japanese calligraphers, who sought to push calligraphy into the territory of pure abstraction, deliberately abandoning lexical legibility in favor of gestural expressivity. The Bokujinkai artists were aware of American Abstract Expressionism and saw it as a Western analog to what they were already doing within the calligraphic tradition — and perhaps as a form of validation.

The essay raises important questions about the dynamics of this exchange. Who was borrowing from whom? What was lost or distorted in translation? When Franz Kline was described by critics as making “calligraphic” gestures, was this a recognition of a genuine cultural connection or a superficial likening of visual appearances that disguised fundamental differences in meaning and context? Winther-Tamaki is careful to insist that the Asian dimensions of postwar abstraction were not simply influences absorbed into a Western master narrative, but genuine contributions that restructured the terms of the encounter.

One key example Winther-Tamaki discusses is Mark Tobey, the American painter who studied sumi-e (Japanese ink painting) with the Japanese artist Teng Kwei in Shanghai and subsequently developed what he called his “white writing” style — small-scale, densely interlaced linear marks that look like a kind of continuous cursive script covering the entire surface of the canvas. Tobey was explicit about his debt to Asian calligraphic traditions, and his case illustrates both the genuine depth of some cross-cultural encounters and the way in which Western modernism often de-contextualized and aestheticized Asian traditions while stripping them of their cultural and spiritual specificity.

The Bokujinkai (Ink Human Society), founded by Morita Shiryu in Japan in 1952, represents the Asian side of this exchange. The Bokujinkai artists pushed Japanese calligraphy toward pure abstraction, abandoning legibility in favor of explosive gestural marks that looked to Western eyes like Action Painting. But their project was grounded in the Japanese calligraphic tradition and in theoretical discussions about the relationship between the visible stroke and the invisible spiritual state that produced it — discussions with no parallel in Western Abstract Expressionism. The apparent visual similarity between Abstract Expressionist painting and Bokujinkai calligraphy conceals a fundamental difference in conceptual framework.

Xu Bing: Invented Language and Radical Literacy

Xu Bing is among the most significant contemporary Chinese artists working with language and calligraphy. His work is central to the course’s argument because it pursues the question of what writing is — and what it means to be literate — with extraordinary rigor.

Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky (Tianshu, 1987–91) is a monumental installation consisting of books, scrolls, and ceiling-hung sheets printed with invented Chinese characters — characters that look entirely authentic, are printed using traditional woodblock printing technology, and are absolutely illegible, because they have no meaning and were never intended to communicate. The project required Xu Bing to carve by hand approximately four thousand individual characters, none of them real. The result is a dense environment of apparent text that cannot be read by anyone in the world, regardless of their education.

Book from the Sky can be read as a sustained investigation of the theme that runs through the entire course: the relationship between writing as image and writing as meaning. Xu Bing produces a simulacrum of writing — an image of text that perfectly replicates the visual conventions of Chinese calligraphy and printing but has evacuated from them everything that makes writing writing. The result is deeply unsettling, forcing viewers to confront how much of their experience of written text is visual and aesthetic rather than semantic.

Project 3 Introduction and Conceptual Groundwork

The Written Word in the Context of Project Development

Week 8 formally introduces students to the final major studio project — a work based on the principles of conceptual art and text. By this point in the course, students have worked through two substantial studio projects: Project 1 based on Islamic calligraphy and Project 2 based on East Asian calligraphy. Project 3 asks students to synthesize their accumulated understanding of how text functions as image and to develop a conceptual art work in which language is the primary medium.

The transition from the calligraphic projects to the conceptual art project is not simply a shift in cultural tradition; it is also a shift in the relationship between skill and idea. In calligraphy, the training of the hand is indispensable — the mark matters because it records the specific gesture of a specifically trained body. In conceptual art, as will be explored in the readings for Weeks 9 and 10, the execution of the work is often deliberately deskilled, delegated, or reduced to the application of a simple procedure. What matters is the idea, the proposition, the concept.

This tension between skill and idea is one of the most generative problems the course sets up. One might initially assume that calligraphy and conceptual art are simply opposites: calligraphy valorizes the trained hand, accumulated practice, and the mark as an expression of embodied knowledge; conceptual art valorizes the mind, the proposition, and the deliberate suppression of manual skill. But the course’s structure complicates this opposition. A Shirin Neshat photograph in which calligraphic text covers a woman’s face uses the visual vocabulary of trained calligraphy to produce a conceptual statement about identity and power. Xu Bing’s invented characters require years of technical mastery to produce and yet are deployed in a conceptual framework that questions the very grounds of that mastery. The course asks students to hold both dimensions simultaneously, and Project 3 is designed to invite them to find their own position in this productive tension.

Comparison: The Calligraphic Gesture Across Traditions

It is useful to compare the physical act of calligraphy as practiced in Islamic, Chinese, and Japanese traditions, because the differences illuminate larger cultural differences in the understanding of what the mark means.

In Islamic calligraphy, the qalam is held at an angle, and the calligrapher writes with the paper on the lap or on a low surface. The thick-and-thin variation of the reed pen is essential to the visual identity of Arabic script, and the calligrapher works within a strict proportional system. The letter is never invented but always inherited — the calligrapher’s contribution is the quality of the inherited form, not its novelty.

In Chinese calligraphy, the brush is held vertically, and the calligrapher works at a table. The range of expression available is wider: the same brush, loaded with varying amounts of ink and moved at varying speeds and pressures, can produce strokes ranging from broad and wet to thin and dry, from slow and deliberate to swift and explosive. The calligraphic styles range from the highly controlled kaishu (regular script) to the wild, nearly illegible cursive of Tang dynasty masters like Zhang Xu, who reportedly dipped his hair in ink and wrote with his head.

In Japanese shodo, both traditions are inherited and synthesized. The five standard scripts include highly regularized forms (kaisho) and highly gestural forms (sosho), and the Japanese tradition additionally works with hiragana and katakana — the phonetic syllabaries unique to Japanese — as calligraphic media that carry their own aesthetic histories and cultural associations distinct from the Chinese-derived kanji. The embodied, meditative dimension of shodo is particularly emphasized in the Japanese context, connected to the influence of Zen Buddhism on Japanese art culture from the medieval period onward.

Art as Idea as Idea — Conceptual Art and Language

Simon Morley and Conceptual Words

The reading for Week 9 is Simon Morley’s chapter “Art as Idea as Idea: Conceptual Words I,” from Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art (University of California Press, 2003). The title of the chapter echoes Joseph Kosuth’s influential redefinition of art-making: the phrase “Art as Idea as Idea” is taken from Kosuth’s own work, and it encapsulates the Conceptual art program of the late 1960s.

Morley opens with a vivid example. In December 1969, the American artist Robert Barry held an exhibition at the Art & Project Gallery in Amsterdam. Gallery-goers arriving at the gallery found the front door locked. Attached to it were two pieces of paper: one carried the gallery’s letterhead with the artist’s name and the exhibition dates; the other was a single typewritten sentence: “During the exhibition the gallery will be closed.” That was the entire exhibition. No objects, no images — just the substitution of a verbal statement for an art work.

Barry’s gesture exemplifies what critics at the time called the dematerialization of art — a radical reduction of the art object to information, to language, to idea. The aim was to redirect the viewer’s attention from the material presence of the aesthetic object to the thinking process that the work set in motion. As the British conceptual artist Terry Atkinson put it, in this new art “the content of the artist’s idea is expressed through the semantic qualities of the written word.”

Morley situates the Conceptual turn in its broader intellectual context. The late 1950s and 1960s were a period of extraordinary ferment in the humanities: structural linguistics, Saussurean semiotics, Barthesian mythology, Chomskyan generative grammar, Althusserian ideology critique, and Wittgensteinian philosophy of language all converged to place language at the center of intellectual life. Artists absorbed these frameworks and understood them as ammunition for the avant-garde’s assault on conventional assumptions about art. If language constructs meaning rather than reflecting a pre-existing reality, then art that uses language as its medium is directly engaging with the systems through which culture organizes itself.

The exhibition Information, held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1970, was a watershed moment. Curator Kynaston McShine, in her catalogue essay, described the conceptualists as seeking “to think of concepts that are broader and more cerebral than the expected ‘product’ of the studio.” The artists in the show — including Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, and many others — demonstrated a shared commitment to the proposition over the object, to the analytic statement over the aesthetic experience.

John Baldessari

John Baldessari is a key figure in this context. His series Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell (1966–68) consists of paintings in which a Mexican sign painter was commissioned to paint, in a plain commercial signage style, a list of banal advice for commercial success (“Generally speaking, paintings with light colors sell more quickly than paintings with dark colors”). By delegating the execution to a sign painter rather than applying his own hand, Baldessari was making a deliberate claim about the centrality of concept over execution. The irony of the content — self-defeating advice that mocks the commercialization of art — was inseparable from the gesture of its making.

Joseph Kosuth

Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965) is one of the foundational works of Conceptual art. It presents a physical chair, a full-scale photograph of that chair, and a dictionary definition of the word “chair” — three representations of the same thing at three levels of abstraction. The work poses the question of which of these representations is most “real,” and implicitly argues that the definition — the language — has priority, since it is the structure within which both the object and the image make sense.

Kosuth’s theoretical essay “Art after Philosophy” (1969), published in Studio International, is one of the defining documents of Conceptual Art. In it, Kosuth argues that after Marcel Duchamp, all interesting art is conceptual in nature because art’s function is the interrogation of the nature of art. For Kosuth, the work of art is an analytic proposition — it provides no information about the world but only about the logical relationships between its own terms. This extreme position places Kosuth in productive tension with the calligraphic tradition, where the work of art is saturated with content — theological, poetic, political — that it does not merely analyze but transmits, preserves, and honors.

Sol LeWitt

Sol LeWitt’s practice is organized around the distinction between concept and execution. LeWitt produced hundreds of “wall drawings” that consist of written instructions — typically very simple statements specifying lines, colors, and directions — that can be executed by anyone, with or without the artist’s direct involvement. The instructions are the artwork; the wall drawings are merely one of their possible realizations. LeWitt’s practice is the logical endpoint of the dematerialization tendency: if the idea is the art, then the physical object becomes entirely secondary, a temporary and incidental instantiation of an eternal proposition.

Creolization — Millennial Words and the Politics of Text

Simon Morley on Words at the Turn of the Millennium

The reading for Week 10 is Simon Morley’s chapter “Creolization: Millennial Words,” the second chapter drawn from Writing on the Wall. Where the Week 9 reading focused on the emergence of the first generation of Conceptual art in the late 1960s, “Creolization” examines how artists at the end of the twentieth century used language in a very different spirit — one shaped by the politics of globalization, cultural hybridity, and the uneasy co-existence of multiple languages and sign systems in a single world.

Morley opens with the Canadian artist Ken Lum, whose works juxtapose the visual conventions of commercial shop signage with politically or emotionally charged personal messages. In one work, the owners of a business called “Hanoi Travel” offer “Disneyland Packages” — while the adjustable lettering below the sign reads “Remember the people’s war!” The commercial format, with its banal typography and promotional logic, is hijacked by the personal and political; the result is a text work that operates simultaneously at the level of public sign and private testimony.

Jack Pierson’s Desire, Despair (1996) makes words for basic human emotional states from old shop-sign letters — the jumbled, mismatched typographic debris of commercial signage — and assembles them into quasi-poetic statements. The work exploits the gap between the impersonal origins of the materials and the intimate emotional content of the words. Like Lum, Pierson uses the forms of alienated commercial language to express something stubbornly personal.

Simon Patterson’s The Great Bear (1992) is a conceptual text work of considerable wit: it reproduces the famous London Underground map in precise detail, but replaces all the station names with the names of famous people from different fields — philosophers, scientists, athletes, actors — organized along each line by category. The map structure is preserved; the content is scrambled. The work exploits the viewer’s habitual relationship to an information system to produce a moment of productive cognitive disorientation.

Tracey Emin appears in Morley’s discussion as a key figure in the move toward a more overtly autobiographical use of language in art. Her appliqué blanket work Mad Tracey from Margate, Everyone’s Been There (1997) — covered with crudely written personal statements, confessions, and graphic language — places the artist’s own voice, in all its rawness and vulnerability, within the formal codes of what might be called a “feminine” craft tradition. The work refuses both the detachment of pure conceptualism and the impersonality of commercial signage; it insists on the aching specificity of a particular person’s experience.

Gillian Wearing’s Signs that say what you want them to say and not signs that say what someone else wants you to say (1992–93) is a photographic series in which Wearing stopped strangers on the streets of London and asked them to write on a piece of card what was really on their minds. The resulting images show ordinary people — office workers, teenagers, police officers — holding cards with unexpectedly vulnerable, funny, or disturbing personal statements. The work makes the gap between public self-presentation and inner life visible through the device of the hand-written sign.

Language, Power, and Resistance

The broader argument of Morley’s “Creolization” chapter is that artists working at the turn of the millennium faced a very different situation than the first Conceptual artists of the 1960s. The dematerialization project of Conceptual art had, by the 1980s and 1990s, been thoroughly absorbed into the art market — conceptual gestures could be fetishized, collected, and sold just like objects. Moreover, the global proliferation of commercial signage, advertising, and mass media had saturated the visual field with text to a degree unimaginable in 1969. Artists working with language in this environment could not simply substitute a word for an image and expect the gesture to retain its radical charge. They had instead to engage with the specific languages, scripts, and sign systems of a globalized but deeply unequal world — to reflect on who controls language, who is excluded from it, and who can reappropriate it for purposes of self-expression or resistance.

Conceptual Art Workshop — Melika Hashemi

Guest Artist: Contemporary Conceptual Practice

Week 11 brings another guest practitioner into the class: Melika Hashemi, a local artist and educator who has worked regularly with the course. Like the Japanese calligraphy workshop with Noriko Maeda earlier in the term, this session shifts from the lecture-and-discussion format to direct, hands-on engagement with artistic practice — in this case, conceptual and language-based art making.

The workshop invites students to approach text as a material with its own possibilities and constraints. What does it mean to choose a particular typeface versus handwriting? A particular language versus another? To place a word in a specific physical location, or to use the act of writing itself as a performative gesture? These are not merely formal questions; they carry social, political, and personal dimensions that the preceding weeks of the course have progressively illuminated.

By Week 11, students are also completing their research essays, which are due this week. The convergence of essay-writing and workshop practice is deliberate: the essay asks students to analyze a contemporary artist’s calligraphic or text-based work in relation to one of the course’s assigned readings, and the workshop asks them to develop their own text-based practice. The two activities are complementary and mutually enriching.

Project 3 Critique and Course Synthesis

The Final Critique

Week 12 brings the course to its conclusion with the third formal critique session, in which students present and discuss their conceptual art projects based on the use of text as image. Like the two preceding critique sessions — for Project 1 (Islamic calligraphy) and Project 2 (East Asian calligraphy) — this session is organized around looking at and talking about art in a community context.

The critique format, in which students present their work and receive responses from both the instructor and their peers, models the professional context in which contemporary artists actually develop and refine their practice. It is not simply an assessment mechanism but an educational experience: seeing how other students have responded to the same prompts and challenges, and hearing the articulation of different approaches, is itself a form of art education that is irreducible to any individual assignment or reading.

Synthesis: Text as Image Across Three Traditions

The course’s trajectory from Islamic calligraphy to East Asian calligraphy to Western conceptual art might appear to be a movement from tradition to modernity, from East to West, from the sacred to the secular. It is worth examining this apparent trajectory carefully in order to resist the simplifications it can encourage.

Islamic calligraphy is not simply a historical tradition that was left behind when modernity arrived. It is a living practice engaged today by artists across the Arabic-speaking world, Iran, Turkey, South Asia, and the diaspora — artists who bring both deep technical knowledge and searching critical intelligence to their engagement with the tradition. The contemporary artists discussed in this course — Shirin Neshat, Nja Mahdaoui, Jamelie Hassan — are not nostalgists preserving a dying form; they are innovators who have found in the calligraphic tradition resources for addressing the most pressing questions of contemporary life: identity, diaspora, religion and politics, the body under surveillance, the limits of language.

Similarly, East Asian calligraphy is not a relic of pre-modern China and Japan. The traditions of Chinese ink art and Japanese shodo are practiced today with extraordinary vitality, and the engagement of contemporary artists like Xu Bing with the questions those traditions pose has produced some of the most intellectually rigorous art of the late twentieth century. The connection that Bert Winther-Tamaki traces between East Asian calligraphy and American Abstract Expressionism reminds us that what looked to Western critics like a distinctly American innovation — the gestural, emotionally expressive large-scale painting — had deep connections to non-Western traditions of thinking about brushwork, gesture, and the expression of inner states.

And Western conceptual art, for its part, is not simply the culmination of a trajectory toward pure idea — toward the complete dematerialization of the art object into language and information. As Morley’s “Creolization” chapter shows, the language-based art of the 1990s and 2000s is thoroughly entangled with questions of cultural identity, globalization, and the politics of whose language counts. Ken Lum’s shop signs, Jamelie Hassan’s Arabic inscriptions placed in Canadian public space, Xu Bing’s invented characters — these works are simultaneously conceptual art and calligraphic art and political art, and they resist any attempt to assign them to a single tradition.

The course’s fundamental argument is that the boundary between writing and image — always provisional, always contested — is one of the places where artists do their most interesting and culturally significant work. The calligrapher who transforms the divine word into a visual object of beauty, the Conceptual artist who substitutes a typewritten sentence for a material artwork, and the contemporary practitioner who covers a woman’s face with lines of poetry are all working in the same space: the space where language becomes something to be seen, felt, and experienced rather than simply read and understood.

The interdisciplinary ambition of the course is also an argument about art education. Professor Esfahani describes designing this course precisely because, when she was a student at Waterloo, the curriculum offered no space for the traditions she came from. By proposing the course to the Studies in Islam department and positioning it within Fine Arts and East Asian Studies simultaneously, she created an institutional form for the argument that Western, Islamic, and East Asian traditions of visual culture are not separate and self-contained histories but interlocking and mutually illuminating chapters of a single, global history of human meaning-making through marks. This is the deeper curriculum that the course teaches: not just the history of calligraphy, not just the theory of Conceptual Art, but a way of seeing that refuses the hierarchies that assign some forms of mark-making to the category of “art” and others to the category of “craft,” “script,” or “folk tradition.”

A student who completes this course should leave with a genuinely expanded sense of what visual art is and can be — a set of frameworks that make both a twelfth-century Andalusian mosque inscription and a 1969 locked gallery door legible as art, and that can make visible the deep connections between these apparently distant objects. That is an unusual and valuable outcome for a twelve-week studio course, and it speaks to the ambition with which Professor Esfahani has designed and taught it over many iterations.

Supplementary Notes: Key Artists and Works

The following artists are referenced in the syllabus as possible subjects for research essays and presentations. They represent the range of practices that the course addresses, from traditional calligraphy through contemporary text-based work.

Shirin Neshat (b. 1957, Iran) — Iranian-American photographer, video artist, and filmmaker. Her Women of Allah series overlays Persian calligraphic text on photographs of veiled Iranian women, exploring questions of gender, religion, and the postrevolutionary Iranian state.

Xu Bing (b. 1955, China) — Chinese-American conceptual artist. Book from the Sky is his most celebrated work, but he has continued to explore language, literacy, and cultural translation in many subsequent projects, including Book from the Ground, in which he develops a universal pictographic language from emoji and standardized symbols.

Jamelie Hassan (b. 1948, Canada) — Canadian artist of Lebanese origin whose installations engage with Arabic script, migration, and postcolonial identity in the Canadian context.

Jenny Holzer (b. 1950, United States) — American conceptual artist whose Truisms series (1977–79) consists of terse, aphoristic statements silk-screened onto posters, T-shirts, electronic signboards, and building facades. Holzer’s work is centrally concerned with the authority of language in public space.

On Kawara (1933–2014, Japan/United States) — Japanese conceptual artist whose “Date Paintings” (Today series, begun 1966) consist of canvases on which the date of their making is painted in white text on a monochrome background. No other mark appears. The works are a meditation on the passage of time, the act of painting, and the minimum conditions of art-making.

Ed Ruscha (b. 1937, United States) — American artist associated with Pop Art and Conceptual Art whose paintings, prints, and books consistently use words as their primary visual subject. Works like OOF (1962) and Hollywood (1968) treat words as purely visual objects, exploring their graphic weight and emotional resonance independently of their semantic content.

Lawrence Weiner (1942–2021, United States) — American conceptual artist who used language as the primary medium of his work. Weiner’s pieces consist of simple declarative statements — written on walls, printed in catalogues, spoken aloud — that describe physical acts or conditions without necessarily realizing them as objects. His work defines the logical outer boundary of dematerialization.

Jenny Holzer (b. 1950, United States) — Her Truisms (1977–79) are short, one-sentence aphoristic statements (“Abuse of power comes as no surprise”; “Protect me from what I want”) displayed in public space using LED signs, projections, posters, and stone benches. Holzer’s work deploys the visual authority of institutional text — the LED ticker, the official memorial plaque — to deliver messages that range from sardonic to deeply unsettling. By placing her texts where official language normally lives, she exposes both the power that language derives from its material context and the way that power can be appropriated and redirected.

On Kawara (1933–2014) — His Today series began in January 1966 and continued until his death. Each painting consists of the date of its making, painted in white on a monochromatic ground (the color varied), always in the local language of the city where Kawara was working that day. If a painting was not completed by midnight, it was destroyed. The series is a form of daily practice analogous to the calligrapher’s daily exercises — a meditation on time, presence, and the act of inscription as an affirmation of existence. The date is both text and image: visually, it is a precisely rendered typographic form; semantically, it records a singular, unrepeatable moment.

Joseph Kosuth (b. 1945, United States) — American conceptual artist and theorist. One and Three Chairs and the Art as Idea as Idea series are his landmark works. His theoretical essay “Art after Philosophy” (1969) is one of the founding documents of Conceptual Art.