When a person travels, either physically or mentally, it is a modernist manner to learn a culture by conquering it with objective research, but it is a contemporary virtue to learn a culture by one’s immersive experience. Taking Eastern calligraphy in his mind as a daily practice, Brandon Sadler is clearly one of the latter. His long-term calligraphy series, with this one from the Transform series par excellence, demonstrates how Sadler absorbs a foreign yet traditional culture in a tender and organic way.

For each diagram you see, Sadler deconstructs an English word into letters, which are the smallest unit that composes every alphabetical language, and then he reshapes the letters according to the strokes in Chinese writings, and then at the end of this process, he reconstructs the word along the structure of Chinese characters. What Sadler is able to produce is a transnational language with openness and variability as a space for both eligibility and aesthetics to reside and react. Language is thus no longer just a sequence of codes, but an image imbued with cultural significance and potential to develop and transform. Within his artistic meditations, Sadler understands both English and Chinese languages in an equal way, looking for their commonality along a universal grammar of morphemes, building his Tower of Babel in an ambitious yet humble, tranquil, and tender way.