About the Words
When speaking of “word,” it’s hard for East Asian artists not to think of calligraphy. The fervor for shaping and beautifying pictographic characters—a passion cultivated over thousands of years—feels as if it's encoded in our blood, even in the context of contemporary art. I am no exception.
I have been entangled with word all my life. Leaving aside its cultural, philosophical, and poetic dimensions, my visual and experiential associations are many: my father was a gifted folk calligrapher whose characters adorned the gates of households and factories in our region—his writing gave me the pride and identity of my childhood. During a period of family misfortune, my teenage years were heavy with contemplation, and copying obscure classical texts became a secret weapon to suppress anxiety and enter a deeper mode of learning. In over two decades of professional artistic practice, the daily ritual of copying Buddhist sutras using traditional brush and ink has been a method of grounding and meditation—even through the unbearable cold of northern winters and the suffocating heat of summer. During the pandemic, when I was trapped in a foreign apartment longing for home, calligraphy once again became my remedy.
But calligraphy is not the same as word. Beyond its link to writing and bodily practice, calligraphy also carries implicit class hierarchies and cultural inertia. In contrast, word—by virtue of its intrinsic connection to meaning—possesses energy simply through its presence.
In contemporary visual art, word has long since broken free from the confines of calligraphy. I first realized this in my Window Series and later Palimpsest Series, where word became not only readable, but also visible—and even tangible. Its visibility goes beyond ornamentation: even when the meaning is obscured—when the viewer cannot read the language, or when the word is smudged or overwritten—it still transmits energy through form. The presence of word always evokes a mysterious spiritual tension. Beyond physical linkage, the relationship between word and meaning seems to possess a wave-like connection that cannot easily be severed.
In the early phase of my work (including sculpture), I was unconsciously influenced by the cultural legacy of calligraphy—through the visual and performative experience of writing. After the Window Series, I shifted toward expressing the essence of word itself—its embedded meaning. In the Palimpsest Series, I went further to explore the heterogeneity of layered scripts and the poetic friction of overlapping writing.
For thousands of years, word has served as the underlying code of civilization. The invention of printing diminished calligraphy, and computers further severed word from its reliance on paper. Yet paradoxically, this detachment has brought greater awareness to the weight of word within the architecture of human civilization.
Today, artificial intelligence is rapidly changing the traditional reliance of knowledge, skill, and even logical reasoning on the human brain. The written word—once born from the collaboration of hand, eye, and mind—is gradually losing the sacred aura that once demanded reverence. As civilization “spills” from the human brain into external systems at lightning speed, new expressive structures have emerged within machines—often surpassing our own. Will this godlike construct bring new forms of love and surprise, or will it confront us with a future we are wholly unprepared to face?
Such thoughts form the underlying context of my two series: Before the Word and After the Word. And the work continues to unfold.
Before the Word Series, 2025, 13 pieces
Before the Word
What is the difference between an artist deeply immersed in the act of creation and a prehistoric person quietly entering a cave to draw in secrecy? Both are attempting to express inner feelings not yet fully formed, using something still in the process of becoming. Both are instinctively experiencing a kind of metaphysical thinking—seemingly useless but profoundly existential—about the self and its relation to the world, even if what they are making may have had other purposes.
“Before the Word” is a meaningful proposition. It refers not only to a time before language, but also to the moment of spiritual ignition at the dawn of artistic creation. It carries the potential for both philosophical and artistic genesis—something akin to phenomenological reduction. Here, word symbolizes not only the written language of civilization, but also the artistic language that embodies individual expression, especially within the East Asian tradition of writing as personal experience. The act of inscribing word thus becomes both the driving force behind human cultural awakening and, perhaps, a powerful symbol of resistance to the standardized machine language of the future.
After the Word Series, 2025,15 pieces
After the Word
Word is a manifestation of civilization. And word may also be the first to vanish when civilization fades. When people speak of a lost civilization, it often means that a group has lost its language, its script. So what remains when human language systems are eventually replaced by those of machines or non-human codes?
I believe the post-civilizational world will still bear traces of the word. But these traces will differ from those found in the natural world. They will be fragments—lines that once moved with the human hand, shapes detached from meaning, broken yet echoing an unwillingness to let go of the old civilizational order. These fragments may become archaeological remains of the age of word.
Before the Word and After the Word share many visual similarities, which feels natural. The emergence and the fading of a civilizational system often form a closed loop. But the intent of both series points to the same question: If familiar systems of meaning disappear, can we still imagine a different human existence? Are there alternative interpretations of being? The fading of a particular civilizational form does not mean the extinction of humanity.
Perhaps what unsettles us is not the loss itself, but the possibility that we are evolving—toward a different, perhaps more advanced, form of humanity.
Curatorial Note
On “Word: Before the Word” & “Word: After the Word”
Loy Luo’s exploration of “word” transcends the textual. These two interwoven series—Word: Before the Word and Word: After the Word—unfold a philosophical inquiry into language, meaning, and visual embodiment. Rather than treating text as content or calligraphic form, Luo approaches it as an ontological force—a carrier of memory, intuition, and cultural consciousness.
In Word: Before the Word, she traces the primordial impulse to inscribe: a time before language stabilized into symbol, where marks were instinctive gestures bridging the self and the unknown. This series gestures toward a shared ancestral moment—when image and text were not yet distinct, and creation was a metaphysical necessity.
Conversely, Word: After the Word imagines a post-linguistic world: a future where human language, once central to consciousness, has been decentered by machine cognition. The fragmented glyphs and veiled inscriptions in her paintings speak of loss, mutation, and resistance. Even when stripped of literal meaning, the word remains present—as a ghostly structure, as trace, as vibration.
Together, the two series form a conceptual continuum. They ask: What remains of the word when meaning disappears? What lies before articulation, and what follows after? In a world shifting between presence and absence, Luo’s works offer both mourning and possibility.
