One Life One Dream series, "World" (蕾絲書法 – 界)

This series involves interviewing Asian immigrants in Paris, asking them to choose a word that represents their life in the city. Hong Wai then transforms their private feelings into hardened voices through lace calligraphy, with each word representing a unique Parisian experience. 界 (Jie - World) Hong Wai folded the strokes of the characters for "界 (Jie - World)" into undulating mountain shapes. From a distance, the work appears as a landscape, but when viewed from above, the character 界 will emerge. The artwork allows viewers to perceive different truths depending on their visual perspective. Hong Wai’s "Lace Calligraphy Landscape Sculpture: 界 (Jie - World)" stands as a radical intervention in both material and meaning, fusing the ethereal delicacy of lace with the gravitas of Chinese calligraphy to create a sculptural landscape that hovers between tradition and transgression. In this work, Hong Wai invents a technique that hardens lace-long a symbol of feminine gentility-into a form capable of embodying the brushstrokes and spatial rhythms of literati painting, yet rendered in three-dimensional space. The result is a tactile terrain where the ancient language of ink is replaced by the intricate patterns of lace, simultaneously evoking the contours of mountains, rivers, and the written word. The sculpture’s pleated and layered surfaces invite the viewer to navigate its topography much as one would traverse a classical landscape scroll, yet here the journey is mediated through the lens of gender, memory, and cultural hybridity.

Created By

Hong Wai