Art inspired by Chinese characters

Whether it is English vocabulary, biological terms or technical words, understanding a foreign language is a frustrating task for most of us.

Yet New York-based German painter Katrin Straub savours her feeling of never quite getting the meaning of words during the process of learning hanzi (Chinese characters).

'I was really fascinated by the visual expressions of these signs and symbols that I didn't understand, but I invented my own meanings,' Straub said. She recalled the magical moments when she first came to Hong Kong in 1994 to work as design director for a design company.

Attracted to the pictorial word forms, she began learning Chinese calligraphy and flew to Beijing to learn Putonghua for six months before moving to New York in 1997 to pursue a master's degree in art at the New School.

To capture that inner feeling that still stirred afterwards, Straub invented a set of stroke characters, which she called 'The 5000 Stroke Alphabet' and resembles Chinese characters.

Hong Kong is the first city in Asia where Straub is exhibiting her work. Her work has been on display in art galleries in New York, including a Japanese and a Chinese one.

Straub said interestingly, the Japanese felt her characters were based on Japanese characters while Koreans thought they were based on Korean words. But although the word forms were familiar, they could not decipher them.