C Y N T H I A - M C V A Y

The Braille Project: Laissez faire uses a book published in 1972 in Chinese Braille that I found in an antique book store in Shanghai in 2006. The 42-page book has been dissembled and mounted on linen in a Chinese red frame behind Plexiglas—accentuating its yellowed age. This piece confronts the Chinese “style vs. content” discussion head-on. With calligraphy, the form and style of the characters has more meaning to many than what might actually be written with those characters. With Braille, that discussion is a mute point since it is devoid of style: it is all about content. Or: is form ultimately content? For clues as to the content, the Asia Society helped with a translation of the title page and the table of contents, which were in Chinese characters. It translates loosely as follows: LAISSEZ FAIRE 1 Early political opportunity; 2 Marx and Engels and their opposition; 3 Exciting opportunism; 4 Result and consequence; 5 Laissez faire and Carnegie Steel. The book is behind Plexiglas and, as such, the book cannot be touched—and is therefore not “readable”; that is, it has been stripped of content for the potential Braille reader. Metaphorically, questions whether the “Laissez faire" is also untouchable in China. Another reason that Chinese Braille is so fascinating, is that the characters are broken down into sounds and reconstructed using Latin Braille values, and so lose the quality of the Chinese characters, which are the basic building blocks of the Asian language, culture and thought.