Art & Culture ・ 02 NOV 2025
The Shape of Script
The work of calligraphers elevating the beauty of Arabic script into contemporary art.
Sharjah, known as a cultural capital, is home to studios scattered throughout devoted to Arabic calligraphy. The calligrapher we visited was pursuing his own experiment: rendering the traditional Kufic script using ink and washi paper.
"Arabic calligraphy and Japanese calligraphy are the same in this: spirit resides in the energy of the line," he told us. The breath of the hand holding the brush, the way ink bleeds into paper. Beyond the meaning of the characters themselves, he said, the two forms resonate in an aesthetics of tension and empty space carried by the line itself.
On the studio wall, alongside a large-scale work inscribed with a verse from the Quran, hung a small piece bearing a single Japanese character: ma — 間. Different writing systems entirely, yet the breath flowing through them was startlingly close.
