Heart Sutra (般若心経) and sensual body art.

Woman`s body is one of the most beautiful and enchanting creations on Earth. Body art is a type of art that is create on or with (as a medium) a human body (source: Wikipedia).

Some of the body art I have seen i was absolutely amazing. Human imagination is a bottomless vessel indeed. However, the calligraphy body art (I am referring here to Chinese calligraphy or Japanese calligraphy body art) is not a very popular subject.

This may be due to the fact that not many people study the traditional art of Far Eastern calligraphy, or perhaps because those who do study it are of a senior age, and erotic body art is slightly ahead of their times or taste.

The concept of my body art project is simply to amplify and complement woman`s natural beauty by a few or a few thousand brush strokes. The subject of my art and photography is a merge of those two. By "dressing" women in Chinese characters, their curves not only speak to our eyes, but also to our soul.

The picture you see here is of my lovely and patient wife (writing alone took 2.5h). I covered her entire body in the text of Heart Sutra (般若心経), which is 268 characters long (without the title). It is one of the most popular, but also one of the most profound sutra texts.

Copying a  sutra text is a form of scared meditation, and it supposed to be performed with respect and dignity . I used the famous version attributed to Wang Xizhi (王羲之, 303 - 361 C.E.) of the Jin Dynasty (晉朝, 265 - 420), who is often referred to as the Calligraphy Sage (書聖). The original was written in semi-cursive script (行書).

To see this image in larger format, please visit my body art gallery.
To read the full text of the Heart sutra please see a work in the Ink Treasures gallery,  which was co-created by myself and Mariusz Szmerdt (翔隼)
To read more about Ink treasures project, please visit our site.

---