Biface Graphy
Performance at Tate Modern (London), 2018. Zhang Qiang & Rebeca Font
In May 2018, the calligrapher Zhang Qiang and I met side by side on a wooden platform at Tate Modern in London, under the framework of the Tate Exchange programme. We pretended to develop the story of a romance without seeing or speaking to each other, only through the contact of our brushes separated by a roll of silk paper. The same performance was originally carried out by Zhang Qiang and Lia Wei in 2009, coined as ‘Biface Graphy’ and raised exclusively from writing. But this time, two cultures coexisted simultaneously on the same platform, as well as two different approaches: Zhang Qiang was going to write, while I was going to draw. His calligraphy and my drawing were going to share the fate of an encounter on the surface of the paper. However, this encounter only seemed to take place when Zhang Qiang stopped ‘writing’ and I stopped ‘drawing’, it was necessary to get rid of the code. It was in the flow of our brushes, in the contact that dragged us along, where we finally found each other. It was not on the surface but in an unthinkable place where calligraphy and drawing blurred their boundaries and met.
The making of this performance encapsulates one of the key critical considerations of my practice: in what way, at what time and how do we access drawing? The encounter between drawing and calligraphy opens up the debate on the true limits of drawing, in harmony with and as part of nature, and challenges the place where drawing seems to occur, displacing it beyond the pre-eminence of language and its monopolisation of the panorama of Western knowledge. Thus, the uncertainty generated in this performance, in the face of the possibility or not of an encounter between calligraphy and drawing, and the questions that arise from it, prompt a more in-depth inquiry in my practice: the beginning of an exploration of the structure of drawing in relation to the human being and the linguistic context in which it is immersed, and from which drawing seems to try to detach itself.
