Three Character Classic has been a required text for all Chinese children and was used in Taiwan at least as late as the 1960s. Kids would recite it as a group, accompanied with the swaying of the body to give it a proper rhythm. It was written in the thirteenth century and usually attributed to Wang Yinglin (1223-1296), a renowned Confucian scholar. The "poem" consists of a series of couplets of three characters. The complete text is less than 1200 characters but in that limited space it manages to enumerate all of the salient features of the Confucian tradition. Children were required to memorize it, much as a Catholic Catechism might be, even before they could read and write.

 

Growing up in China, Chinese culture plays a big part in some of my works. It makes me really think about my own culture and where I am from. Also being inspired by Italian writer Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, this semester, I started to work with ice cubes which can suggest a period of time and memory. Being inspired by confucianism and the motion of pure water, I developed an installation using 1140 ice cubes with Chinese calligraphy on it. The contents of the calligraphy is the book Three Character Classic. After all the ice cubes melt, only some marks were on the paper, and everything is not readable.