Four Days Four Gates

A gate invites passage through an otherwise obstructed space. Less generously, it obstructs what otherwise would provide passageway. Attached to a fence or wall, a gate provides both discontinuity in and continuation of the given perimeter, contingently.

[On the First, a spare, elegant image of a gate scanned from a paperback called The Way of Chinese Painting(Vintage paper, 1959.), whose author, Mai-mai Sze, carefully culled its contents from her own The Tao of Painting, published in two volumes in 1956. Below this, a known sign meaning "gate" in three distinctive yet similar renditions, the first influenced by classic Chinese calligraphy, the second by an almost Gothic orderliness of stroke, and the third by the resource constraints on digital representation of the complex signifiers of East Asian orthography. On the Second, the gate is closed. On the Third, the gate is closed. On the Fourth, a word on gate].

Four Gates