These paintings feature idiomatic phrases and colloquialisms from the Toisan and Cantonese Chinese dialects. The calligraphy, though resembling Chinese, is actually written with an invented phonetic system. Written Chinese has no alphabet, and reflects the literary compromise between what are in reality disparate languages. The paintings are built up in layers, until the individual words and phrases are unreadable. The amalgamated characters are embossed from the reverse side. There are no phrases or words to focus on specifically, as hundreds have been written and buried into the paintings. San Pai Ji are tablets found in ancestral shrinse featuring names of ancestors, spirits, and personally meaningful phrases. These paintings share that title, in veneration of this language that so specifically points to an epicenter of emigration, and the untold stories within it’s vernacular domain.
