Post-Marijuana (Dama zhi hou), Written in Shadow Script

Artists

Description

This large, horizontally oriented, rectangular album leaf is as much a play with splashed ink as it is a work of calligraphy. It features three large splashes of very black ink, one at the top center, one in the lower right corner, and one in the lower left corner that extends three-quarters of the way up the side of the leaf; a final, small splash appears in the upper left corner. Tiny splashes of ink and broad but faint brush strokes intersect the large splashes, linking them together and visually texturing the interstitial spaces. The calligrapher, Fung Ming Chip (b. 1951; standard Mandarin transcription: Feng Mingqiu), visually enlivened the paper in this manner as a background for the seventy-eight character text of “Post-Marijuana”, which he inscribed in "xingshu", or cursive script, in a manner that he characterizes as Shadow Script, a term he uses to describe characters written with dark watery ink on a black ground. The text is a challenge to read because the characters are very faint, they are widely dispersed, and they often overlap. The artist used pale, watery ink to write the text; the characters in the areas of paper left white are so pale that they are virtually invisible on first inspection, just as those in the ink-splashed areas are so pale that they virtually disappear into the dark splashes.This calligraphic work is not dated; however, the artist stated to Robert D. Mowry that he created it in 2009. This calligraphic work is not signed, but it includes three seals of the artist, which appear in a vertical column down the center of the composition and which identify it as a work of Fung Ming Chip. The three seals, which the artist himself carved, and their locations can be described as follows: Top: Square, red, relief seal reading "Ming Chip" (Ming Qiu) (Artist’s given name) Center: Square, red, relief seal reading "Xie Xin Qu Yi" (“Meaning from the heart”) Bottom: Square, red, relief seal reading "Si Bu Guan" (Note that the seal reading Si Bu Guan refers to the artist’s studio: the “Studio of the Four No’s”) The inscribed text can be translated as follows: Post-Marijuana The happiness that follows marijuana The twisting and turning Stretching into empty space Craziness and chaos intermingling Mixing good and evil Moving on and on Beyond the sense of value Breaking the shackles of the prisoner’s age of time Striding towards the edge of the night The furthest edge of life Treading, spinning Consciously sinking to the bottom Detached from the soul To become a saint

Dimensions

Calligraphy proper: H. 45.6 x W. 64.9 cm (17 15/16 x 25 9/16 in.) Mounting: H. 50 x W. 70.1 cm (19 11/16 x 27 5/8 in.)

Provenance

Fung Ming Chip, Hong Kong (2009-2010), sold; to Susan L. Beningson, New York, 2010, gift; to Harvard Art Museums, 2011. Footnotes: This work was created by Fung Ming Chip in Hong Kong in 2009.