A Floating Life Among Characters

A Floating Life Among Characters is an art picture book by architect and painter Zeng Renzhen (also known as "Yushan" or "Yushan Fankuan"), created from Chinese characters as raw material—and the first collected publication of his "Between Characters" series. The book contains 181 works, all built on the idea of "pictures within characters, characters within pictures": some take apart and reassemble the strokes and components of Chinese characters, turning their skeletons into spaces and houses you can walk into; some restore idioms and set phrases to concrete scenes of daily life; and some reinterpret famous lines from Tang poetry and Song ci through imagery. The book is divided in turn into "Characters and Characters," "Characters and Set Phrases," and "Characters and Poetry": 57 character groups, 59 set phrases, and 65 classical poems are each translated into pictures. A recurring "little figure in white" reads, meets friends, falls in love, daydreams, and dozes among the characters, enacting scenes of ordinary life familiar to everyone, with a faint breath of everyday warmth within a square inch. The author's background in architecture and garden design gives these pictures a clear sense of space: the structure of a character is treated as a courtyard you can wander and dwell in, and strokes become walls, bridges, paths, and eaves, so that the flat page acquires three-dimensional depth. The book is bound with exposed spine and thread stitching, so it lies flat for reading; it suits slow perusal as an art album, and also serves as a primer on Chinese characters and traditional culture.