Chinese and Hebrew lettering workshop
TU B'AV x QIXI
Collaborator: Ilan Potash, Amir Kreichman, Sivan Matiavich, Roni Meltzer, Shahar ErenfeldS
A Project at As We Design
Tel Aviv | 2019
Tu B'Av (ו"ט באב) is the Jewish day of love and Qixi (七夕) is the traditional Chinese Valentine's day. During my internship in AS WE DESIGN in Tel Aviv, I organized a calligraphy workshop exploring lettering combined with Chinese and Hebrew languages expressing the meaning of love in Israeli and Chinese culture.
The Yad Yitzhak Ben Zvi Archive, part of the National Library of Israel Digital Collection
Chinese folk fairy tale about Qixi
TU B'AV & QIXI
Tu B'Av (Hebrew: ט״ו באב) is a minor Jewish holiday. In modern-day Israel, it is celebrated as a holiday of love (חג האהבה).
The Qixi Festival(七夕节) also known as the Chinese Valentine's day, is a Chinese festival celebrating the annual meeting of the cowherd and weaver girl in mythology. The tale of The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl has been celebrated in the Qixi Festival since the Han dynasty. The earliest-known reference to this famous myth dates back to over 2600 years ago.
Coincidentally, both Tu B'av and Qixi are in August.
LOVE
Love encompasses a range of strong and positive emotional and mental states, from the most sublime virtue or good habit, the deepest interpersonal affection, to the simplest pleasure. The word "love" can have a variety of related but distinct meanings in different cultural contexts.
In Hebrew, Love is ahava (אהבה), which is made up of three basic Hebrew letters: aleph (א), hey (ה), and vet (ב).
In Chinese, Love is 爱 (ài), which is made up of "爫"(hand), "冖"(cover)、“心”(heart)、“友”(friend). 爱 is an ideogrammic compound character(being interpreted as combining two or more pictographic or ideographic characters to suggest a third meaning). From the composition of the character 爱, it means to open up the concealment of the heart, so as to open up minds and make friends genuinely and sincerely
Hebrew is written from right to left while Chinese is written from left to right(simplified Chinese) or vertically in columns going from top to bottom and ordered from right to left(traditional Chinese).
THE WORKSHOP
Collaborated with Israeli designers Ilan Potash and Amir Kreichman, we researched the expression of love in literature and tradition in both Chinese and Israeli cultural contexts. The workshop aims to explore the combination of Chinese and Hebrew typography design.
(Proverbs about love in Simplified Chinese, Pinyin, Xiaozhuan, English and Hebrew)
(Sketches during the workshop, at AS WE DESIGN)
