When Letters Take Shape
CARATTERI. Calligrafia e tipografia: Corea del Sud e Stati Uniti, Museo Correr, Venice
The exhibition CHARACTERS. Calligraphy and Typography: South Korea and the United States stages a confrontation between graphic systems and practices of the mark by focusing on phonetic scripts and their expressive potential. Developed within the East West Calligraphy framework, the exhibition brings together works by four contemporary artists engaging with the Hangeul and Latin alphabets alongside historical documents that trace the theoretical and practical evolution of writing. Rather than offering a purely aesthetic reading, the project presents writing as a space of tension between form, thought and culture. Korean artists Kim Doo Kyung and Kang Byung-In approach Hangeul as gesture and visual rhythm, transforming vowels and consonants into sequences of lines that oscillate between calligraphic discipline and freedom of movement. Writing becomes a bodily act, a practice in which the sign records the time of action and the relationship between hand, breath and surface. On the Western side, Thomas Ingmire works at the boundary between text and image, merging poetry and graphic structure in compositions that challenge the distinction between legibility and abstraction. Through letterpress typography, Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. restores a political and social dimension to the word, showing how printed language can still operate in public space as a tool of engagement and statement. The dialogue between calligraphy and typography is not resolved as an opposition between tradition and modernity, but suggests a continuum of practices in which the mark is always a carrier of meaning. The presence of historical materials reinforces this perspective, reminding us that every alphabet is the result of cultural and ideological choices. In this encounter between East and West, writing emerges as an active device, capable of shaping thought and making visible the deep connection between language and form.