Cultural Overlay and Word Play

In preparation for the upcoming exhibition, Transformations and Translations: The Art of Una Kim and Janet Kozachek, I am now dividing my art work in to three parts: work that can be modified to suit the newly recognized requirements, work that shall be replaced, and work that cannot be replaced but must be re-purposed to use in a lecture only.

The diptych drawing of two figures, Cultural Overlay with Word Play, is an example of the last category. It won’t be on display but I still hope to use it in a lecture as it ideally suits the theme of the exhibition. The figures were drawn from plaster casts of classical sculptures found in a study collection in a museum. The one on the right has a title that alludes to ancient Greece but the writing is ancient Chinese. The script is written in a style that might have still been in use as inscriptions on bronze vessels in China and in a time that parallels the rise of ancient Greek civilization.

I will not translate everything here so as to leave something for my lecture, but will point out an amusing bit of word play in the three Chinese characters below the figure on the right. Chinese characters often have repeating parts, called radicals. Radicals are generally found on the left of a word, on the top of it, or surrounding it. The three words here all include the radical that means woman. I cannot type this in at present because my new computer does not yet have software downloaded to type in this script, so I’ve written this out on a separate piece of paper. Chinese characters can be compounded as logical aggregates which indicate meaning by a building up of parts. The first character, an, is such an example because it is composed of a woman underneath a roof and means "safety" or "peace." Other times the part does not indicate meaning but only sound. The second and third characters are phonetics, with the "woman" part signifying gender but the second part alluding to sound. Therefore the second word means "nun," with a combination of "woman" and "mud." This is not a disparaging remark about nuns, but rather that the word for nun, ni, "sounds like" the word ni for mud. The third woman is a mother, with the word for woman attached to the word ma, which means horse but is simply pronounced like mama.

The intended pun in this phrase is that an, ni, and ma all strung together spell out anima, a term coined by Carl Gustav Jung to describe the feminine part of the male consciousness.