Four Sections of Poetic Logograms | 四段诗意汉字

“Chinese characters look like little drawings."

I've heard of this impression from quite a few non-speakers, which is rather understandable as one who has lived under an alphabetical writing system for a long while.

As a native Chinese speaker (Mandarin speaking, specifically, with simplified Chinese writing system), I don't think I'm able to empathize with those who acquire the Chinese language as their second or extra tongue, even if I always tried to do a simulation in my mind. This uncrossable gap of perception is fundamentally a matter of cognition and linguistic environment.

The initial motif of creating these visual(textual) poetries is derived from my interest in a practice of elementary Chinese teaching -- comparing the oracle bone script characters with the modern Chinese characters to impart learners the visual origins of some basic logograms. By doing so, the learners would presumably understand the character better knowing the pictorial nature of the logograms.

In my personal experience with language learning, singular sensibility towards words and meanings constantly interrupts my ability to maintain logical consistency. In short, subjective receiving makes me feel a language deeper, if not more intact.

When I reexamine my mother tongue, I think about how I could re-translate these logograms so I could deliver not just the standardized "mountain means mountain because it looks like a mountain" answer, but more of sensible imagery. The four very experimental and subjective poetic bilingual re-translations of Chinese characters(汉字) eventually stumbled across my mind with arduous effort.