Twice Back

I didn't always want this.

Growing up, calligraphy was something my father required of me — not something I chose. He was strict in the way that serious artists sometimes are: exacting, patient with the brush, less patient with excuses. I practiced because I had to. I can't say I loved it then.

Years later, I found myself studying Chinese literature at university. Not because of calligraphy, but despite it. Somewhere in those classical texts and histories, something shifted. The brushwork I had resisted as a child began to look different. I picked up a brush again, this time on my own terms.

That was the first time I came back.

常樂齋 was the name my father gave to his artistic life. He is a calligrapher and seal carver, born in Tainan, later based in Taipei. A traditional artist with a quiet stubbornness about his work. He spent his life devoted to written form: the movement of the brush, the weight of the carved seal, the balance between ink and empty space.

常樂齋 was never a business. It was simply the name of how he lived.

Living far from home, with a family of my own, I found myself thinking about the smell of ink. The sound of a brush moving across paper. The seals he carved and the chops of red they left behind. A whole world that existed inside our home, that I had taken for granted, and that I didn't want to disappear.

That was the second time I came back.

Chang Le Studio is my attempt to carry that world forward. Not as a museum piece, but as something still alive. My father continues to create. I take what he makes and bring it into a new context: into contemporary spaces, into homes that may have no prior connection to Chinese culture, into the hands of people who may simply find something in these works that speaks to them.

You don't need to read Chinese to feel the presence of a brushstroke. You don't need to know the history of seal carving to sense that something in these forms has weight.

That, I think, is what my father always understood. And what I am still learning to say.