The first thing to say about Tsai Charwei, visual artist and constant inscriber of Buddhist sutra, is that she really likes to write. "It's kind of an obsessive thing," says the 33-year-old, who was filling up her adolescent notebooks and college sketchbooks long before she incorporated her passion into her artworks.
"It's more about the act of writing and less about the fact that I'm a writer - the content isn't that profound."
Although she grew up in a family that had many art collectors, Tsai's start was more coincidental than planned. She was working as an assistant to Cai Guoqiang in New York when the contemporary Chinese artist was sufficiently impressed by one of her ideas to recommend her to show at Fondation Cartier in Paris in 2005.
"It was really by chance," Tsai says, shrugging. "I wasn't trained in fine arts."
For that first exhibition, Tsai wrote the Heart Sutra on a block of tofu with black ink, then let it decay. She developed an interest in, and memorised, the seminal Buddhist text about emptiness and impermanence as a child in Taiwan and has repeatedly revisited it in her art.
Tsai's latest application of the Heart Sutra text can be found in the Incense Mantra series - four photographs and one video that Tsai is exhibiting at "Meeting Point", a dual show at Edouard Malingue Gallery, also featuring the works of Taiwanese artist Wu Chi-tsung.