At the Museum of Music in Bologna, an exhibition on contemporary Chinese calligraphy

From Oct. 12 to Nov. 5, 2023, the International Museum and Library of Music in Bologna will host the exhibition INKiostro di Voci: Luo Qi and 30 Years of Calligraphy, the result of the University of Bologna’s ERC Strating Grant project WRITE - New Forms of Calligraphy in China: A Contemporary Culture Mirror, which is concerned with studying new forms of calligraphy in contemporary China.

The exhibition aims to celebrate the 30th anniversary of one of the main currents of contemporary Chinese call igraphy called “calligraphism,” of which Luo Qi is the founder. In fact, Luo Qi is one of the most important living Chinese calligraphers and a professor at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. Thanks to the collaboration with the Bologna Civic Museums Sector, the first results of the project will therefore be at the Museum of Music with a series of collateral events, curated by the Principal Investigator of the project Adriana Iezzi, assisted by her team and the support of the entire Department of Interpretation and Translation - DIT.

The decision to exhibit Luo Qi’s works at the Museum of Music is due to the fact that his artistic thinking is largely based on theinteraction between calligraphy and music. Luo Qi is in fact greatly influenced by Western art, which revolutionized the very way calligraphy is done by creating a universally accessible asemic language that can be defined as “music of the written sign” or “music of the line.”

In the exhibition space on the ground floor, the public will thus be able to admire scripts that reproduce the sound of Buddhist litanies, calligraphies that translate the music of famous Italian opera arias (recalled in the museum rooms on the main floor), and finally rhythmic musical pictograms that will also form part of the interior courtyard setting of Palazzo Sanguinetti. There will also be texts testifying to the activity of calligraphy and a long vertical scroll that will be made on the opening day (Oct. 12) during the Musicalligraphy performance and then later displayed on the monumental staircase.

The opening event of the exhibition is scheduled for Thursday, Oct. 12, at 6 p.m. at the Music Museum’s Event Room: calligraphy, music, dance and augmented reality performance Sound MAP - Musicalligraphy Augmented Performances, which will be attended by the two master calligraphers Luo Qi and Silvio Ferragina, pianist and impro-performer Giusy Caruso and dancer Agnese Gabrielli, with the technological support of LWT3, which will be in charge of the sonification and 3D visualization of the performance event. This is a world premiere and an unprecedented multidisciplinary experiment that marks an advance in the artistic research of new international calligraphic experimentation. An original musical notational system, specially created by calligrapher Silvio Ferragina, is used as the material on which the composition was generated and on which the music and dance improvisations are grafted, preceded by a purely performative moment of the piece by composer Zhenzhen Zhang.

Motion sensors will also be used to trace the artists’ gestures and the calligrapher’s brush so as to restore to the audience the magical correlation between visual sign and gesture, between rhythm and choreography, between silence and acoustic and electronic sound.

Access with reservations required: https://www.eventbrite.it/e/biglietti-sound-map-musicalligraphy-augmented-performances-728295400147?aff=oddtdtcreator.

Directly related to the exhibition, an international conference entitled Chinese Calligraphy and Music: Meeting of Voices will be held on Friday, Oct. 13, from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. in the Museum’s Events Room, with experts from prestigious European and Chinese universities and institutions participating to discuss the millennia-old relationship between calligraphy and music and its implications in contemporary art. Some Chinese musical instruments belonging to the Museum that have never been shown before will be presented during the conference.

A number of events are also associated with the exhibition, including calligraphy workshops, guided tours, book presentations and calligraphy and music performances: on Saturday, Oct. 14 at 5 p.m. there will be a presentation of pianist Giusy Caruso’s (Royal Conservatory of Antwerp) book La ricerca artistica musicale (LIM, 2022) in the presence of the author; on Saturday, Oct. 21 at 5 p.m. authors Marta R. Bisceglia, Adriana Iezzi and Martina Merenda will talk about the volume Graffiti in China dedicated to the global art movement that is constantly developing and expanding in contemporary China; on Sunday, Oct. 22 at 11 a.m. there will be a guided tour by reservation accompanied by exhibition curator Adriana Iezzi; Sunday, Oct. 29, from 4 to 7 p.m., is scheduled Inky Strings, a “musicalligraphy performance” by Chinese artist Echo Morgan, one of China’s leading female performers, accompanied by Chinese lutenist Yu Qiling, to be followed by an artist presentation by the artist herself; Sunday, Nov. 5 (finissage), from 10 a.m.30 a.m. to noon, there will be a calligraphy workshop for children 4-5 years old and, from 4:30 p.m. to 6 p.m., one for adults.

Image: Luo Qi, Musical Calligraphy - Silent Melodies No. 1-12 (2018; ink and color on paper, 32x378 cm)

At the Museum of Music in Bologna, an exhibition on contemporary Chinese calligraphy

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