During my french course in Geneva, my teacher asked me to write a Kanji on the white board. After I was finished, the teacher tried to copy it as closely as he could. But it was a little bit strange for me. I started to wonder how Kanji change and loose their function as they are written by people who are not familiar with Japanese writing.

 

In this work I used Japanese writin­­­g as reproduced by 50 peoples.

 

1. I wrote the word Shogyomugyo  «諸行無常 » in cursive (Ref.1) using Adobe Ilustrator. As the Hiragana and Katakana alphabets were originally based on an evolution of Kanji written in cursive style (Ref.1)).

2. A person who is not famillar with Japanese writing then copies the writing as accurately as possible without knowing its meaning, and the next person then copies this new version, and so on.

(Even though some of the later participants were Japanese, they didn’t know the meaning of what they copied.)

1. I continued like this with 50 people. I compared 3 different styles of typographies with the same word, slowly changing as it was copied by the participants.

The meaning of Shogyomugyo  «諸行無常 » is « The impermanence of worldly things; All worldly things are transitory ».

 

Little explaination about Japanese writing.

Japanese writing is composed by 3 types of letters.

 

The KANJI     There are more than 3000in Japanese writing and, as logographs, each represents a word.

The HIRAGANA  There are 46 of them and they are used as the Japanese phonetic alphabet.

The KATAKANA  There are 46 of them, they represent the same phonetic sounds as , but they are used for foreign words.

 

In Japan, we didn’t have any writing before we imported the the Kanji from China. After we stared to use Kanji, some of them changed little by little and over time formed the distinctive syllabary alphabets of the Hiragana and the Katakana (Ref.1). I think this is an interesting historical example of influence and evolution.

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ジュネーブでフランス語の語学学校に通っていたころ、漢字をホワイトボードに書くように先生に頼まれた。私が漢字を書き終えた後，先生はできるだけそれを同じように写そうした。

しかし先生が写した漢字は私にとっては違和感があった。私はもし日本語が日本語になじみの無い人たちに経由された場合、どのように変化し、どのように機能を失っていくのか興味を持つようになった。

５０人がこの作品に参加した。

 

1. アドビ　イラストレーターを使って草書体で諸行無常と書く。なぜならひらがな、カタカナは漢字を草書体で書く事によって生まれたからである。

2. 日本語にあまり親しくない人が出来るだけ忠実に１の文字を写す。このとき、書き写す人には文字の意味、またこれが日本語であるという事も伝えない。そして次の参加者は前の参加者が書き写した物を書き写す。

（後に日本人も作品に参加するが、彼らも書かれている物の意味を知らずに参加した。）

1. このプロセスを５０人に至るまで続けた。また同じ文字を三種類の違う書体で用意し、それぞれどう変わって行くのかを比べた。

 

諸行無常とはこの世の現実存在はすべて、すがたも本質も常に流動変化するものであり、一瞬といえども存在は同一性を保持することができないことという意味である。

 

 

 (Ref.1)

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