Hey, a choreographic work that premiered at Melbourne Fringe in October 2023, was created by choreographer Weichen Cui in collaboration with visual artist-designer Haocheng Zhang and musician Monica Lim. The piece integrated movement, embodied drawing, recorded sound, and an installation-like prop—water paper. This special calligraphy material reveals transient black marks when wet, returning to blankness upon drying. The work embodied the metabolism of the human body and its connection with nature, culture, and society, rooted in the artists’ nomadic experiences across diverse countries and cultures, evoking themes of displacement and nostalgia.

In performance, the artists began with individual acts of drawing: Cui improvised movements tracing lines in three-dimensional space, while Zhang drew two-dimensional visual forms on the water paper. Gradually, their separate practices evolved into a collective process, connecting spatial and planar drawings through bodily interaction. Throughout this collaboration, patterns on the water paper emerged from emptiness to visibility, from fragmentation to cohesion, continuously shifting and layering until the stage was fully covered, making invisible traces of motion tangible. Ultimately, the patterns formed something akin to a map, visually realising the artists’ geographical wanderings and evoking a sense of an action map, a visual representation of movements and journeys through space and place. As the water evaporated, visible patterns returned to invisibility, echoing Daoist notions of formlessness.

Extending from this performance, Zhang created a typographic work of the same name, inspired by the spatial traces documented during the live performance. The typography transforms bodily traces on water paper into letterforms, capturing a process of creation that moves from formlessness to form. 

Shaped through ongoing artistic dialogue, this paper brings together two distinct yet interwoven perspectives on the same creative work: Cui’s choreographic lens and Zhang’s approach to visual art and design. Each explores a different facet of the process, contributing to a layered understanding of the collaboration. From a choreographer’s perspective, Cui reflects on how cultural memories are translated into choreographic thinking, how the influence of calligraphy connects body, movement, and drawing in performance, and how somatic awareness, as the foundation of the creative process, shaped the work’s overall structure. From the perspective of a visual artist and designer, Zhang discusses how Daoist philosophy and the concepts of xiang (象) and xing (形) informed his embodied drawing as a performer within Cui’s choreography, and how this experience evolved into an experimental typography practice that challenges conventional approaches to typographic design through an emphasis on embodiment.

This paper is intentionally structured as a multi-voiced narrative. Zhang and Cui contribute distinct, yet interwoven reflections shaped by their respective practices in visual art and choreography. Each section’s first-person voice corresponds to the author named in the heading, which allows personal and disciplinary perspectives to emerge side by side. This structure mirrors the dialogic and interdisciplinary process of this artistic collaboration. Shared reflections and conceptual syntheses are presented in the introduction and conclusion as a collective voice.

hey: The Choreographer’s Map and View

The Origin

Greetings to the loss of cells and memories in my body, leaves in fall, and the moon yesterday.¹ 

I (Weichen Cui, in Hey: The choreographer’s map and view, hereafter ‘I’) wrote this line in my choreographic journal; it later became the seed for a piece titled hey. Hey was the first work I began after returning to Melbourne from New York. It was a reflection on a decade of movement—dancing, studying, drifting across borders and disciplines.

Around that time, I met Haocheng Zhang, who had also just relocated to Melbourne. Drawn together by shared experiences of migration and transition, I invited him to join the process. Beyond shared life experiences, we also discovered artistic affinity: as artist-researchers, we sensed that our distinct disciplines—choreography and visual arts—could spark unexpected dialogues in collaboration.

My PhD research investigates how somatic practices inform the choreographic process of a dancer working outside China while remaining deeply connected to Chinese cultural roots. In his research, Zhang explores experimental typography and visual practice through the lens of embodied movement and Daoist cosmology. From these intersecting paths, we began to create a work that speaks to our shared experience as Chinese artists living across worlds.

The Transformation

What connects movement and drawing, and how might this relationship unfold within a performance context? In Yves Klein’s Anthropometries (1960), naked female bodies coated in blue paint press or drag themselves across canvas, leaving behind bodily imprints as traces of presence and motion. In Trisha Brown’s It’s a Draw / Live Feed series (2003), Brown places charcoal or oil sticks between her hands and feet and improvises across large sheets of paper, generating gestural marks through movement. In Anthropometries, Klein positions the body as a tool—a living brush that leaves behind imprints of physical presence. In contrast, Brown’s drawings foreground the body as a thinking, sensing subject, where movement and mark-making unfold simultaneously. While their approaches differ, both practices leave behind traces that embody both the immediacy of movement and its unfolding over time.

This type of practice points to a broader investigation into the relationship between drawing and performance. The term ‘performance drawing,’ first introduced in Catherine de Zegher’s curated publication Drawing Papers: Performance Drawings, refers to a lineage of practice that can be traced back to the 1960s.² This lineage includes artists working across disciplines—primarily within a Western context—such as Alison Knowles, Carolee Schneemann, Richard Long, Robert Morris, Tom Marioni, Trisha Brown, and William Kentridge.³

Embodiment serves as a pivotal point where body, movement, and drawing (manifested through visible traces) intersect. While discussions of performance drawing have largely developed within Western art histories—from process-based practices such as Jackson Pollock’s drip and action painting to later works by artists like Klein and Brown that more explicitly frame drawing as a performance event—I suggest that, within Chinese cultural practice, calligraphy can also be understood as a form of performance drawing.

One of the earliest inspirations for my choreographic thinking came from watching my father, a calligraphy practitioner, copying Wang Xizhi (王羲之)’s Preface to the Sacred Teaching (圣教序, 653, Tang dynasty stele inscription). I was mesmerized by the process—before writing each character, he would rehearse the gesture mid-air, making decisions about force, rhythm, spatial arrangement, and minute bodily control, all carried out with quiet intensity. Even then, I intuited that this was a deeply embodied practice akin to my dance and rehearsal process: a training of the body’s responsiveness through iterative gesture and refined control. Just like Philosopher Mathias Obert describes, the calligrapher must first embody the model character through bodily mimesis, converting the visual form into a kinaesthetic ‘bodily attitude’ before the brush ever touches paper.⁴ In this view, calligraphy is not mere imitation but a ‘transformative understanding through the body’ that entails a uniquely ‘re-creating responsiveness’ in execution.⁵ 

Another image that shaped my choreographic decisions regarding media and materials is from early mornings in Chinese parks: elderly men using oversized brushes dipped in water to write calligraphy across the concrete ground. The characters faded as they evaporated, leaving only wet traces and, eventually, nothing but the practitioner’s shadow. Anthropologist Angela Zito frames this practice as a kind of poetics of disappearance suffused with enchantment, noting that the calligraphy ‘evanesces, disappears, and is written again and again in the same space,’ and that when its practitioners depart, they carry nothing with them but ‘their brushes, and a more skillful soma’.⁶ 

These memories shaped the foundations of my choreography and suggest that Chinese calligraphy is a culturally embedded form of performance drawing; one that intrinsically links movement and mark-making, the ephemeral and the enduring. In this tradition, the brush becomes an extension of the body; every stroke is guided not only by visual form but by breath, intentionality, and the circulation of energy qi (气). What emerges is not a static image but the residue of movement—fluid, temporal, and expressive. Calligraphy, in this sense, reveals the body’s internal rhythms, translating somatic experience into movement, and movement into line.

Over the last few years, calligraphic forms have experienced a significant revival across East Asia, developing into new modes of contemporary art. This can be seen in Kazuo Shiraga’s bodily approach to painting from Japan’s Gutai movement, shodo performances by Sisyu, Uehira Baikei, and Narita Masumi, and the large-scale, performance-based calligraphy of Wang Dongling in China.

This embodied connection between movement and stroke in Chinese calligraphy has influenced contemporary dance, particularly in its somatic dimensions. An illustrative example is Cursive: A Trilogy (2001–2005), choreographed by Lin Hwai-min, founder of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre. In this work, dancers internalise the qualities of cursive script (行草), embodying its fluidity and spontaneity through continuous movements that resemble calligraphic brushwork. As Iezzi suggests, Cloud Gate’s choreography translates calligraphy into a tangible physical language, where the dancer becomes the brush, and the stage becomes the page.⁷ Similarly, choreographer Shen Wei’s piece at the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony (2008) featured dancers using their ink-covered bodies as brushes, leaving vivid traces across a giant scroll. Both works reveal how calligraphy offers a kinetic inspiration, where bodily responsiveness, energetic flow, and intention shape movement as a form of drawing and writing.

McGuire identifies a shared yet unspoken aesthetic in Chinese calligraphy and martial arts, describing a rhythmic quality characterised by flowing movements punctuated by a brief deceleration before rapidly accelerating at the conclusion.⁸ Szeto refers to this embodied sensation in Lin Hwai-min’s Cursive series as ‘calligraphic kinesthesia’,⁹ which Lin argues physically enacts and constructs cultural identity.¹⁰

In my choreographic practice, beyond merely translating visual materials into physical language, my attention is primarily on exploring the underlying questions of ‘how,’ ‘what,’ and ‘why’: How do I embody the acts of writing and drawing? Through experiencing this embodied process, what emerges, how do I articulate my personal narrative, and why does that matter?

Therefore, our creative process consistently originates from embodied movement, beginning with exercises designed to cultivate and shape somatic awareness. From there, the choreographic material we generate is fundamentally rooted in somatic experience. For myself, as a dancer usually ‘drawing’ within three-dimensional space, the inquiry revolves around how I embody memory while simultaneously interacting with another dimension—horizontality—to leave visible traces. For Zhang, as a visual artist and designer, the question becomes how bodily awareness transforms three-dimensional embodied memory into detailed patterns and imagery on a horizontal surface. Ultimately, we collaboratively create within a shared spatiotemporal field, where distinct artistic languages converge through embodied exchange.

In this context, the body emerges as a site where cultural memories are dynamically transformed and reimagined, allowing tangible and visible forms to trace their origins back to internal somatic sensations (from visual to proprioceptive and kinesthetic awareness). Simultaneously, the ephemeral nature of dance acquires lasting, visible form through the lingering traces, thereby translating kinesthetic experiences into enduring visual expressions. 

hey: The Designer’s Map and View

In hey, the performance, I (Haocheng Zhang, in Hey: The designer’s map and view, hereafter ‘I’) spent almost the entire performance drawing and writing with my body on the water paper. Through continuous embodied drawing, I allowed my gestures, body, breath, and inner rhythms to leave images. I think the movement itself becomes a graphic act. These embodied drawings challenge the tradition of graphic design. Instead, it proposes that graphic design can be performative, temporal, and embodied. This invites a rethinking: What is graphic design? How do I do graphic design?

The Embodied Drawing 

The embodied drawing process has led me to explore what an embodied image is, and how the invisible can be made visible. I began to realise that each stroke is a way of thinking through the body. When I perform embodied drawing in hey, I respond instinctively to the dynamic relationship between xiang (象) and xing (形). Xiang implies the metaphoric presence, whereas xing relates to concrete appearance. The hand does not simply draw or write on the water paper, it becomes a sensing agent, attuned to the weight of breath, the resistance of paper, and the unfolding of body memory.

As Yuk Hui suggests, Chinese thought often involves a movement from the visible to the invisible, a conscious attempt to transcend form. As he notes, ‘the great image has no form’ and ‘the essence of art is its locality’.¹¹ In a related context, Kitarō Nishida, founder of the Kyoto School, proposes that if being is the central question of Western thought, Eastern thought is more concerned with nothingness. Within this framework, while Western art privileges form, Eastern art tends toward the formless.¹²

Building on these reflections, the relationship between form and formlessness offers a framework for understanding how Chinese aesthetics navigates the visible and the invisible. In this light, the relation between xiang and xing reflects how formlessness gives rise to image. Using water paper for painting provides an opportunity for reflecting on the creative process, as if the body is drawing tools on the moving scroll. This seems to be a valuable tool for enhancing the creators’ proprioceptive sensitivity, allowing for the diverse exploration of interdisciplinary dance and visual art experiences in contemporary art.

Henk Borgdorff argues that artistic research depends on context. He says it is not only about ‘knowing that’ or ‘knowing how’. Instead, it explores a space where we do not fully know yet.¹³ This space is uncertain. It leaves room for things we do not expect. It also allows new ways to think and ask questions. Because of this openness, artistic research often breaks away from fixed rules. It welcomes change and invites new paths. As Danny Butt, a scholar of artistic research, argues that artistic research can unsettle established knowledge and open up other ways of seeing.¹⁴

From the perspective of a research-based artistic practice, the embodied drawing in hey has not only been about making an image, but more about noticing what embodied knowledge is generated while I perform, and letting this process teach me how I move, sense, and respond.

It is worth noting that after the performance ended, the fixed camera I had left running unexpectedly captured several audience members approaching the stage to closely observe and photograph the residual images of the embodied drawing on the water paper. Their actions not only prolonged the work’s viewing time but also generated new spaces for communication and display beyond the original stage, allowing the performance to transition naturally into another, more open form of presentation.

The Graphic Design

As William James’s theory stresses, consciousness is not a succession of ideas but a flux that perpetually changes and never apprehends a thing, image or state twice in an identical way.¹⁵ When I engage in embodied drawing on water paper, each pattern and trace that appears is different from the last. Even within the same rehearsal process, the marks left behind are always unique and cannot be replicated. On the one hand, the water paper effectively records the bodily imprints and visual traces; on the other hand, these images gradually fade away with the passage of time. This ephemerality raises a fundamental question: what is the significance of these abstract bodily images? What kind of knowledge resides in the unrepeatable?

Perhaps we can find the answer within choreography. As Barnard and deLahunta question the forms of inquiry that best promote interdisciplinary projects, they suggest that embodied experiences might serve as a bridge between distinct disciplinary practices.¹⁶ This emphasis on embodied experience invites me to consider how movement itself can function as a form of design thinking. As Laura Karreman notes, citing Ann Cooper Albright, a contact improvisation exercise imagines a writing instrument at the top of the head drawing through three-dimensional space; Albright suggests that the trace it produces would resemble a hieroglyph.¹⁷ As a graphic designer, this metaphorical act of hieroglyphic inscription resonates strongly with typeface design practices.

If embodied experience can recuperate and incorporate other forms of cultural practices, might it also serve as a critical framework for rethinking contemporary artistic production?

This question drives another practice-led research project, HEY Movement Typography. Inspired by the concepts of 'becoming water' and 'embodying river', this typeface captures the fluid and dynamic nature of the movement and embodied drawing, translating these concepts into an experimental typography.

In the performance hey, I engaged embodied experience as a mode of typographic thinking, one that reimagines typography not merely as text information, but as an extension of cultural storytelling and bodily movement. The 'glyph' becomes a way to explore identity, perception, and artistic process. I realised how different it felt to design a typeface from my body rather than from behind a screen. In most of my graphic design works, I often refine letterforms through grids, vectors, and precise adjustments, but here, the shapes came first as embodied traces, drawing, and movement-driven, before becoming type. These forms carried an honesty that no amount of digital refinement could replicate.

This embodied design process, from formlessness, moves toward form (有形), and ultimately into typeform (字形). This process reflects a Daoist logic of formlessness, where meaning arises not from imposed structure but from the spontaneous unfolding of form within formlessness. In this sense, type design becomes an act of embodied cultural storytelling; typographic form born from embodiment. It can be seen as a regeneration of thought-images. It also coincides with the core idea of artistic practice as research; that is, producing knowledge in the process of practice.

Unexpectedly, when I put these experimental typefaces together, they became a new ‘landscape’ in which fluid and abstract poetic images appeared. Each time I combined these typefaces randomly, I found they closely resembled the images on water paper from the performance. It became a form of typography derived from bodily traces, and then, in turn, a resonance and interpretation of those traces through the type itself.

As Japanese design theorist Mukai Shūtarō notes in his contribution to Matsuda Yukimasa's Constellation: The Functions of Circle and Square (圆与方), in the modern artistic revolution, language and text, too, can break free from the linear tradition of pages and poetry, dancing freely through space and opening up myriad possibilities ¹⁸. And Richard Buchanan, a scholar of design theory and design thinking, argues that as disciplines become more fragmented, new methods are needed to reconnect theory and practice. ¹⁹. The HEY Movement Typography methodological framework questions conventional typographic forms. Through an embodied exploration that interweaves dance, drawing, and design within a multidisciplinary framework, the approach redefines how movement can generate new forms of cultural storytelling and design thinking.

Conclusion

In hey, we draw upon Chinese Daoist culture, emphasizing bodily intuition and insight, and explore the realms of embodied traces, movement, and graphic forms. Hey reveals how choreography, drawing, and cultural memory can converge in an embodied, practice-led inquiry that moves between xiang and xing, the visible and the invisible. In this process, performance and drawing are not merely an act of output, but a perceptual and reflective practice grounded in bodily presence. 

Rather than offering closure, hey offers a culturally situated expression and reflection that integrates choreography with visual art. It leaves its questions open, inviting further exploration of how movement and drawing might continue to intersect in evolving bodily and cultural contexts.