HKU Bulletin February 2004 (Vol. 5 No. 2)

41 40 THE ARTS T he husband and wife team of Jean and Sun-chang Lo teamed up to create a daring exhibition that combined female nudes with stripping revered Chinese calligraphy down to its bare essentials. Their Nudes and Naked Calligraphy exhibition that took centre stage at the University Museum and Art Gallery that played at the end of 2003 with both the human form and forms created by the human mind. Sun-chang, who arrived in Hong Kong via Guangdong, Taiwan and the US, is an Associate Professor wi th the Department of Architecture while Jean is a part-time Lecturer with the same Department. The nudes gives Jean free reign to explore her background in fashion and life drawing but the couple team up to deconstruct calligraphy before reassembling it in a grid pattern that throws up new images. Sun-chang said: “Most calligraphy has become an elitist art and the aesthetics have become removed from calligraphy and calligraphy has become removed from life. “We wanted to strip meaning, structure and form away and then reconstruct them in a dynamic and symmetrical way. We wanted to return calligraphy to its original primeval state. “We wanted to make an essential connection between ancient and modern.” The genesis of the exhibition lay in 1999 when Museum Director C.T. Yeung saw Jean’s work but it was only in early 2003 that she was invited to mount this exhibition, along with her husb S a u n n d - . Chang said: “Jean was a fashion designer, which requires a deep understanding of human form to fit the garment over the body, as well as illustrating human form. “All along she has done life drawing and she can roam freely with the tiniest nuance in a way that the human body becomes an art rather than a discipline: you let the line speak. “In that way (human nudes) are very calligraphic because Chinese calligraphy stresses a three dimensional line which is also naturalistic and lively.” Bare Necessities