Seal carving provides one with a direct and intimate way of bonding with stone as a material and experiencing the gaps and intersections between calligraphy and epigraphy. Back at the start of the project, Lia shared with the interns and participants of our launching day her freshly edited sealbook, gathering more than a decade of fumbling into sigillography. Over the months, step by step, everyone was more or less hooked on this discreet corner of the history of writing. On November 30 and December 13, 2023, we invited Laurent Long, member of the prestigious Xinling seal society 西泠印社, to share with our team of interns the basic principles of seal carving. M. Long gave us an introduction on the history of the discipline and spent the two sessions devising a choice of character forms, transferring the characters to the stone surface, and providing advice on carving technique. Laurent Long will propose two workshops for Inalco students during our exhibition, on October 11 and 18.

Back in December 2023 and February 2024, when Kento Ashikari presented his literature review of the Japanese reception of Zheng Daozhao’s oeuvre, we were struck by Sakata Gensho 坂⽥⽞翔’s comment in his 1984 monograph (Zheng Daozhao Cliff carvings of Unexplored Shandong 鄭道昭 秘境⼭東の磨崖):

“The rock is relatively soft. Later (at home in Japan), I tried to use a small seal cutting chisel to engrave a stone, which I had brought back from Baijugu. It was not as good as a seal stone, but I managed to engrave it.” (Sakata 1984:188).

During his many journeys in Shandong, M. Sakata paid special attention to the work of masons and quarrymen, sometimes just at the foot of the mountains, like in Tianzhushan. We want to try more of this, and envisage a hands-on epigraphy workshop in 2025.

During our own fieldwork in Shandong in September 2024, we could interview Master Song Zhansheng 宋占胜, a stone mason hired by the officer in charge at Dajishan – Li Yuanquan 李元泉 -, to reproduce three inscriptions by Zheng Daozhao after them being damaged by a local villager named Ren Zuoguan 任作官 in 1991.

When meeting for a few days in Brussels in June 2024 around the making of paper and cardboard models of Zheng Daozhao’s four mountains, we also created a collective stone forest, or a miniature iscribed landscape – 迷你摩崖.

Each of us chose a soft stone to be shaped (or just combined with others, taking advantage of its natural shape) and engraved.

While Paula picked a few stones with grinding marks to create her own little pocket quarry, Killian went for a 此也 in the Zheng Daozhao vein…

。。。Tchou-Tchou opted for three pink stones to build a floating Penglai group and Anna engraved a smooth pebble-shaped piece of yellow rock。

Francesca transformed a serpentine slope into an hybrid between Seng’An Daoyi’s Sutra Stone Valley and his Water Buffalo hill, Kento chose fragments of a seal to engrave with the hiragana classifier for “a mountain” 。

This composite inscribed landscape of our own was backed up with a few large stones previously exhibited by Lia and Marie-Françoise Plissart in Brussels. The show at Odradek was an attempt to open a dialogue between the introvert seal carver and other ways to inscribe the landscape.

Finally, at the occasion of our post-fieldwork exhibition, we decided to constitute a seal society named “Grutto”, from the sound ぐるっと “to turn”, and as in the character 回, “to return”, and redacted the following Manifest:

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