Palimpsest
In textual studies, a palimpsest originally referred to a manuscript—typically on parchment—whose surface had been scraped or washed clean for reuse. This practice arose out of the practical need to conserve materials. Over time, the term has been widely adopted in disciplines such as architecture, archaeology, and geomorphology to describe states of continual reuse and transformation. A palimpsest often bears traces of layered histories, each inscription annotating or obscuring the ones beneath it.
My creative process is, almost without exception, one of rewriting—but not in the sense of erasure and replacement. Rather, it is a deliberate refusal to erase: a practice of layering. I choose to preserve original traces and allow them to coexist with new inscriptions, overlapping and interacting across time. As the writing accumulates, earlier marks become increasingly obscured, harder to decipher. Yet as legibility diminishes, perceptibility is paradoxically heightened. It is as if the written word contains an energy field independent of semantic meaning—one that persists even when no longer readable. Like fragments of history buried by time, the more elusive they become, the more urgently they call for excavation and interpretation. The resulting material strata exceed the limits of visual aesthetics, unfolding into more complex dimensions of meaning.
As an artist trained in traditional Chinese calligraphy since childhood, I do not merely rewrite; I foreground the act of writing itself. This gesture has long become embedded in my bodily memory—a tactile impulse that moves from hand to heart. In the Palimpsest series, writing functions not only as a process of inscription, but as an embodied form of cultural memory and a continuous inquiry into the structures of language, gesture, and visual perception.
Visually, the series draws from the dynamic interplay of concealment and revelation in Chinese calligraphy, while also incorporating minimalist order, material texture, collage logic, and the expressive energies of abstraction. These heterogeneous elements collide and coalesce, articulating a cultural state in which writing and rewriting, erasure and emergence, coexist in ongoing tension and transformation.（Loy Luo)
Palimpsest, 2021-2023
Curatorial Note
In the Act of Rewriting: Text, Body, and the Synchronic Theater of Culture
Commentary on Loy Luo’s "Palimpsest" Series
In Loy Luo’s Palimpsest series, rewriting is not a return to the past—it is a generative act, a reanimation of textual bodies into a new cultural energy field.
Rather than simply visualizing the archival concept of the “palimpsest,” Luo enacts a painterly writing—one that liberates text from semantic necessity and reattaches it to the body, to gesture, to the sensory. In the ongoing tension between inscription and erasure, visibility and opacity, writing transforms into image, into texture, into the material vibration of memory.
These inscriptions are often illegible, yet always palpable. Fragments of Buddhist sutras, guqin scores, nomadic poetry, and displaced histories are layered and submerged in translucent acrylic fields—folded and unfolded like archeological strata. The viewer does not merely read; they excavate.
This is not writing as a mode of communication, but as a choreography of history—one rooted in Luo’s embodied calligraphic tradition, yet ruptured by his experience as a cultural migrant. The strokes resist assimilation. They push against the orthographic order of both Chinese and Latin scripts, staging a silent rebellion through texture, rhythm, and absence.
What emerges is not a text, but a site: a theater where languages collide, dissolve, and regenerate.
Luo’s work thus proposes a question both ancient and urgent:
What can writing still carry, when meaning falters?
And how can its unspoken residues summon new forms of presence?
This is not the painting of a text, but the drawing of a textual cosmos.
