LOY  LUO 

 

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)