Endless Rhythm
Being transplanted from Hong Kong to the Netherlands for decades; the daily practices of playing music with calligraphy keeps the two worlds inside me in balance, especially in writing lines in the Wild Cursive Style. From the rhythms and music I felt by studying the works of Zhang Zhi張芝(-died 192), Zhang Shu 張旭(675-750), Huai Su 懷素(725-785) and Zhu yin Ming 祝允明(1460-1526), I followed their ways of singing and dancing with the brush and ink on paper, to express my innermost feelings freely and directly without restrain. It is writing and painting at the same time; control and spontaneous, virtuosity and accident, conscious and unconscious, tension and relaxation, rhythm in repetition.
The large number of Chinese classical poems I had learned by heart as a child in Hong Kong provided me a huge amount of different types of lines and dots in the subconscious. These poems flew naturally, without thinking, from my hand into the paper. I can play hours and hours in a kind of trance, using the rhythms I gained from the mountain ranges in China, and the water landscapes in Amsterdam, or playing in the rhythms of minimal music. The sense of self simply disappeared. Hundreds and thousands of meters of rhythmic lines were created.