Writing to Escape the Words
Considering asemic writing, expressive calligraphy, and post-literate abstraction — ancient and modern…
It seems the origins of asemic writing, as a respected artform, can be found in ancient China, as far back as the mid-eighth century. Despite this, when I was studying art and design to degree-level — albeit decades ago, now — I never came across the term ‘asemic’ in relation to either graphic design or expressive art. Yet it was practiced by American poet, Emily Dickinson in the mid-nineteenth century and was central to the development of abstract expressionism in the 1950s ‘New York Scene’.
Incidentally, my spellcheck is still underlining the word ‘asemic’ in red as I type. Yet, I was recently curating a handful of submissions from a small group of artists and at least two mentioned their fondness of “asemic, post-literate mark-making”. Did they know it’s one of my favoured expressive modalities?
Perhaps the first deliberate practitioner of the form is Zhang Xu, officially known as Zhang Changshi, and as ‘Bogao’ to his friends. Zhang Xu was a poet, philosopher, and official calligrapher during the height of China’s Tang dynasty who was famed for his eccentric behaviour and fondness for wine. Reputedly, he would become so impassioned when writing his poems that his…
