Exhibition of Katsumi Asaba’s Latest Work
For the Second Tokyo TDC Exhibition – “ Passionate Asia and Her 89 Typedirectors,” I featured 22 different Asian scripts in my work. Among these, there was one mysterious script that particularly fascinated me. This unique pictographic system, or the “Nakhi pictograph script,” is still used in ceremonies by the Nakhis, one of the minority tribes of Yunnan Province, China. Who are these people? What do they look like? How do they use this script? My curiosity about these images would not leave me and eventually, I found myself in China, accompanied by a prominent linguist, gathering information from the Nakhis. I transformed this script into the artwork that won the award in the exhibition. In addition to the Nakhi script, I also incorporated the Yi script, which is still used by the Yi tribe of Yunnan and Sichuan Provinces to publish a daily newspaper, and the Xi-Xia script, which had been lost beneath the sand for 800 years, to make a series of 3 scripts.