This is a powerful piece from the artist’s calligraphy practice initiated in 2010, as he continued to develop his calligraphic transformation of the English alphabet and experiments with representing an entire English word in a single character. Applying the principles of Chinese calligraphy, the artist uses stroke-shape, stroke-order, and flow to arrange the four letters of an English word “time” to fit within a square format – the design parameter for characters in the Chinese writing system – and thus creates the Single Word Character. The cursive and bold strokes push the boundaries of the square frame, as he questions and explores racial perceptions and the confines they may create. In the artist’s words, his work is “an expression of Blackness not indebted to the parameters of the American lens; it carries prayers and ancestral underpinnings, while it searches for transcendence in a modern world.”

这件充满力量的作品来自艺术家从2010年开始的书法实践。在此过程中，他不断发展英文字母的书法转化，并尝试用单个字符来表示整个英文单词。艺术家通过应用中国书法的原则，使用笔画形状、笔画顺序和流动性，将英文单词“time”的四个字母排列在一个方形格式内——汉字书写系统的设计参数——从而创造出单词字符。这些草书和粗体的笔画突破了方形框架的界限，就如他在其中质疑和探索种族认知及其可能产生的局限性。艺术家表示，他的作品是“一种不依赖于美国视角的黑人的表达；它承载着祈祷和先祖的根基，同时在现代世界中寻找超越。”