Calligrapher Tong Yang-Tze at the Met

Source: NYT (11/9/24)
This Taiwanese Calligrapher Brings a Message of Freedom to the Met
Tong Yang-Tze is reviving an ancient but disappearing practice and making it contemporary — writ large.
By Zachary Small. Photographs and Video by An Rong Xu

The boulders hiding in the alcove of Tong Yang-Tze’s apartment testify to this Taiwanese calligrapher’s daunting perfectionism.

They are paper — remnants of discarded artworks, crumpled together like used tissues and soaked into inky wads of pulp. Hundreds of old drafts of writing, including many of her efforts to draw Chinese poetry at monumental scale, have been recycled into these rocks over the years, most recently as she worked on her commission for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which will debut on Nov. 21. Curators call it the most important showing of calligraphy in the United States by a woman in recent memory and say it will bridge the art form from its ancient history to the 21st century.

Earlier this fall, Tong, who is 81, unfurled scrolls on the floor of her Taipei apartment, pushing furniture to the walls before dipping a comically large brush into a mixing bowl filled with velvety black ink. She was preparing designs for the two paintings that will hang from the Met’s iconic entryway, the Great Hall. The texts consisted of sayings from poets born thousands of years ago, delivering messages about values like pragmatism and morality. But in the hands of a master calligrapher like Tong, the Chinese characters are also imbued with nuance — no two characters are ever the same — and moxie, in her supersized work. “Here in Taiwan, the immense freedom has allowed me to focus singlemindedly on developing my art,” she said.

And then, she dances. Heaving the giant brush across the 280-square-foot picture plane with shocking speed, Tong drew the Chinese characters that she has studied her entire lifetime. She was building on the lineage of old masters like Yan Zhenqing, an eighth-century calligrapher, military general and governor of the Tang Dynasty, attempting to revive a dying practice by making it contemporary, political and distinctly Taiwanese.

“I owe my artistic career to Taiwan,” Tong said, speaking through a translator.

Considered one of her country’s most important artists, Tong was born in 1942 in Shanghai, on the mainland. She and her brother and parents moved to Taiwan (then called Formosa) in 1952, several years after Mao Zedong established the People’s Republic of China, forcing Chiang Kai-shek and his anti-Communist followers in government to leave for Taiwan. Three of Tong’s sisters stayed behind with an aunt, which led to decades of separation because of Taiwan’s volatile relationship with China. With an American friend’s help, they were able to arrange for her siblings to travel to Hong Kong to reunite briefly with the rest of the family after President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972.

Tong pursued calligraphy to pass the time, gravitating toward the bold linework of Yan instead of the examples of softer styles usually recommended to young girls of her time. Her father required her to practice writing 100 large characters and 200 small characters every day, starting in fourth grade.

It was the kind of artistic education that Tong said had largely vanished from mainland Chinese schools because of politics, with calligraphy practices left to the rarefied pursuit of artists and scholars (though in recent years, China has put a new emphasis on calligraphy in an attempt to reassert “traditional” Chinese culture). Taiwan continued to use the traditional characters, rather than the simplified characters the mainland uses, and taught calligraphy in its public schools for many decades, but the practice of calligraphy has been fading.

And globally, the number of people familiar with calligraphy is vanishing. Tong observed that most young Chinese speakers use electronic devices to automatically generate characters through transcription or by using English phonetics to prompt the characters.

“I think nowadays people have gotten lazier,” said the artist, who spends the majority of her waking hours at work.

Calligraphy is an instinctive practice for Tong. She develops her “word paintings” from small reference drawings that anticipate where every drop of ink will land on the scrolls. But she often compares herself to a jazz musician whose music is constantly changing. No two brushstrokes are alike, infusing her practice with a sense of spontaneity.

“Everything happens in your mind,” the artist explained. “You just express it.”

Given the size of her artworks — one of the biggest is a hand scroll measuring 6 feet by 170 feet — and the limited space in her apartment studio, everything must happen in rotation. The artist shifts around different portions of her scrolls as she works, unable to see the result until weeks later, when she rents a local warehouse to unroll several artworks at once. Sometimes, when she doesn’t like what she sees, she discards the calligraphy, adding to her collection of 17 boxes of the paper boulders, and starting again.

“She wrote more than 40 drafts for the Great Hall commission,” said Lesley Ma, the Met’s associate curator of Asian Art in the department of Modern and Contemporary Art, who selected Tong for the project. “And she is always anxious because maybe she wrote something in September, but is not able to see it until October. She looks for what is right and what is wrong.”

That level of uncertainty — bringing the possibility of failure — is what worried Tong’s father when his daughter announced her intention to become a calligrapher and to study Western art by traveling to the United States in the late 1960s. At the time, calligraphy was made mostly for gifts and favors, not as salable artworks. But Tong continued on her path, arriving at the Brooklyn Museum Art School in 1967 and graduating with an M.F.A. in painting from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1970. In the United States, she was inspired to start painting at a monumental scale after she saw works by artists like Matisse, whose “Dance (1) ” she admired for its energy and purity. She also felt a sense of competition looking at the gestural paintings of Abstract Expressionists like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, in which she saw the linework of calligraphy.

“I will show you,” she remembers thinking.

Tong returned to Taiwan and subsidized her artistic practice with commissions, designing the visual signage at train stations and bookshops, for dance troupes and jazz musicians, and even adding Chinese characters to a Chanel anniversary ad campaign. Her work hangs in Taipei’s Songshan Airport and the city’s National Concert Hall, a sprawling arts complex.

In 2013, Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs invited her to create the country’s passport stamp, an honor that she humorously downplayed as easy work.

“The characters were very regular,” she shrugged. “Not many people in Taiwan know that my calligraphy is on the passport stamp. I didn’t even discuss it with my brother. It is only when I go through customs that the immigration officers see my name and know it was me.”

Thanks to those commissions, Tong became world famous without a presence in the art market.

Yet given the dimming popularity of calligraphy, she has trouble finding brushes that can match the size of her aspirations; her current tools were ordered on a Chinese e-commerce site, Taobao.

Ma, the Met curator, was introduced to the artist in 2010, but she had admired her calligraphy since childhood. “I grew up in Taipei, and I remember that we had a catalog of hers,” Ma recalled. “At the time in elementary school, we learned calligraphy and we copied dead guys from the Tang Dynasty. You never thought there could be a woman.

“When I actually met her in person,” Ma added, “it was a little surprising how petite she was and the way she talked.” They collaborated on a 2021 commission at the M+ Museum in Hong Kong, where Ma worked at the time. “She is not as patient a person as you would think. It’s often, ‘OK, next. Chop! Chop!’”

Behind that impatience are the creeping feelings of anxiety and doubt that have replaced the brash confidence of youth.

“When I was younger, I didn’t care if other people could read my works, so I could do whatever I wanted in a courageous way,” Tong said. “But as I age, I think about the people that I am trying to speak to.”

During the interview, Tong initially said that she tried to stay away from politics in her work. “I would prefer my art to be strictly art,” she said. But hours later, pulling a catalog from a bookshelf in her apartment, she flipped through examples of calligraphy that she had made in the wake of political upheaval in Taiwan.

She paused at one artwork made in response to a 2006 corruption scandal that ended the career of the country’s president, Chen Shui-bian. Taiwan was still a young democracy and the president’s conviction on bribery charges felt like a turning point. So Tong borrowed a phrase from the ninth century Tang Dynasty poet Xu Hun: “The mountain rain is imminent; in the pavilion, the wind swirls about everywhere.” The poet conjures the fear and anxiety that build before an impending storm; Tong said she had the same feelings as public outrage and protests grew in response to the president’s betrayal.

The resulting artwork was 25 feet long, requiring viewers to walk alongside it while taking in her heavy ink blots and wispy brushwork, which conveyed a sense of imbalance.

Chen was ultimately sentenced to 19 years in prison. In 2019, the artwork was presented at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, part of Tong’s first retrospective exhibition, celebrating her 50-year journey.

Tong is hoping to recapture that boldness with the commission at the Met Museum. She has been thinking about her American audience, which probably has little exposure to calligraphy, and of her Chinese audience — which accounts for nearly four percent of the museum’s international visitors. (Before the pandemic, almost 10 percent of those visitors were Chinese.)

From nine different texts, the artist ultimately chose two for the Great Hall. One was inspired by the Book of Songs written nearly 3,000 years ago: “Stones from other mountains can refine our jade.” According to Ma, the phrase was traditionally interpreted to mean that talents from another country can be useful to one’s own. Modern interpretations have shifted to reflect on how accepting differences can help us improve.

The other adage was written by the poet-scholar Su Shi in 1100 about his creative process: “Go where it is right, stop when one must” — a saying that reminds the reader to have self-awareness and practice moral restraint.

For Tong, who has memorized hundreds of sayings, the phrases hold personal meaning. But she said she selected these texts to help people find their places in the world, expressing a desire to reach tourists from mainland China.

“I chose these words for the people who will read the works,” the artist said, adding that these visitors “will think about what the meaning is because they haven’t seen these words in a long time.” And now that they have started to read, she added, “they can reflect upon how to be a man, how to be a citizen, how to be free.”

Zachary Small is a Times reporter writing about the art world’s relationship to money, politics and technology. More about Zachary Small