About the museum

The Museum of Calligraphy will hopefully be that unexpected inn overlooking a savage coastline.  It will be a place of shelter.  A place of reconnoitering.  A place where one who knows can see in the work of others those who know, too.  And it will welcome the learning.  Though, in some cases, I suspect the transformation from neophyte to sophisticate is quite quick.  It is, perhaps, something one has been learning all along and then one is given the symbolism of the quiz—the work—and one realizes immediately what has been in the making for so long.  If this makes sense to you, great.  If not, please look around.  If it is meant to be a shared journey, get some paper and an instrument you care for and make a foray.  Who knows…you may end up looking at your reflection in the works you make that someday find themselves here. 

About the portfolio

Life Sentence is the reflection of a project across the equation y=x.  It is the y axis becoming the x.  So we need a little backstory.  Before the calligraphy project, there was the writing project.  In a café at night under the figurative moon-shadow of Taipei 101—then, the tallest building in the world—it occurred to me to write the longest sentence in the world.  Here, we have our axial conflation: the verticality of the building and the horizontality of the writing.  Both, projects of length.  Voyages.  Forms of travel.  And after writing and more writing and even more writing, it occurred to me that I could transliterate the work on the sentence as a work in asemic writing: and so, page after page—huge pages—did I write.  The sentence, in case you were wondering, never ends.  The sentence, which became a book, finalizes itself in the shape of the Yau-Calabi manifold…something of 11 dimensions that can tesselate all space and matter.  I’m not a physicist, so forgive me if I’m extracting meaning from something that isn’t really accurate.  We do that.  Artists.  And for me, I needed to “end” something in the pluripotent form that is neither beginning nor end, but the stuff of the entire project of time and space writ large: in a way, an artist attempts to be this manifold, too—this sentence—this small thing that by sheer hard work and commitment transcends the category of the sentence or the self and becomes the library…it is not hubris.  Far from it.  Try it for yourself.  

About the artist

Kevin Brown is an experimental concept artist, photographer, writer, calligrapher, and sometimes sculptor.  Only in making does he stabilize.  Only in work.  His wish—his recurring wish—has been for continued energy to work.  It doesn’t necessarily matter what one works at…work is a gift.  It is what we need health for.  Then, there is relaxing.  Then, there is recognition.  If we are lucky, there is understanding.  But if not, we continue to look at things from a solitary vantage on top of whatever mountain we have climbed.  In any event, it is the chance to work, meaningfully, that confers meaning.  So…enjoy, and then get to work.