The art of fake Chinese characters

For most of us, not understanding a foreign language is a frustrating, not to mention humbling, experience. For German artist Katrin Straub, studying in Beijing for several years and speechless whenever she tried to decipher Chinese characters, it proved an inspiration.

'I couldn't understand a damned thing,' she says, still obviously astonished. 'I started assuming I saw all sorts of things in the words, and that's how I became so interested in what we make up, what we can invent.' So Straub made up her own alphabet, and part of the fun of painting and displaying it has been that people think it's for real.

'In New York, where Chinese people don't read it much any more, they create their own meanings. That one over there,' she says pointing to a painting, 'they think it's the characters for good luck.

'It's amazing what we like to see in things. And it's fascinating how Eastern and Western people can look at something and have an entirely different interpretation of it,' she says.

Yellow lines have been interpreted as Taiwan's topography (there is little resemblance), and red strokes are presumed to be the character for female.

Straub's exhibition, The 5000 Strokes Alphabet, at the Goethe-Institut, is not about conning the public, but about getting us to really look, and to question what we see. 'I am fascinated by the visual expressions of language, particularly those which cannot be deciphered,' she says. 'My art questions the common understanding of the written language, and centres around an alphabet which invites or even forces the viewer to create his own interpretation.' She sticks to her original alphabet which has been carefully jotted down in a folder, but in her paintings she plays with its shape. To that end, she has spent a long time finding unusual typefaces for her alphabet which is now getting even bigger.