Different Strokes and Art of Calligraphy : Exhibit: ‘Ink in America’ at Golden West College shows how the discipline has expanded and taken on new meaning.

If calligraphy is the fine art of handwriting, is it still calligraphy if you can’t make out the letters?

Absolutely, says Sun Wuk Kim, who mounted the “Art of Ink in America” exhibition on display at the Fine Arts Gallery of Golden West College through Dec. 15. In many works at the show, it is difficult to discern any characters.

“Certainly these pieces are all calligraphy,” Kim said by phone during an airport stopover between Orange County and his home in New York. “Even if a viewer cannot recognize a letter distinctively, it is the letter that has been deformed.

“Contemporary calligraphic art has expanded its range,” he said. “Often there is no clear-cut limit between calligraphy and painting.”

That’s not all that’s not clear cut.

The show is called “Art of Ink in America,” yet the 15 artists (who contributed 41 works) represent China, Japan, Korea and France as well as the United States. It is described as an “International Contemporary Calligraphy Exhibition” yet is mostly limited to the use of Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters.

According to Richard Strassberg, who wrote the introductory essay for the show catalog and who has taught Chinese calligraphy and painting at UCLA, what makes a 4,000-year-old Asian tradition “international” is that its readability is inconsequential:

“The tradition of abstraction in the West has encouraged artists to focus less on [linguistic] reference in favor of communicating other, more purely visual values, even to the point of dispensing with conventional [meaning] altogether.”

The result is letters unfettered, characters that have thrown off their shackles; what counts here is the spirit rather than the letter of the letters.

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Fine Arts Gallery curator Donna Sandrock believes the show is “the essence of modern man facing calligraphy with modern ideas and emotions.” Nevertheless, some of the most basic tenets of honored traditions remain uncompromised: Said Kim, “This is one-stroke art. Adding a stroke is not allowed.”

Other “international” aspects include the use of color in some of the works, and media other than ink, such as acrylics. Decidedly un- international is the fact that only works by masters of Asian technique, which utilizes a soft brush instead of the hard pen of the West, have been included.

The emphasis may be less on what the characters say and more on the feeling behind them, but the question remains whether Western viewers can intuit the true meaning of these works (“Just as in other fields of art, calligraphy expresses our life, our philosophy, passion, joy, sorrow and anger,” Kim said) without some understanding of the characters they’re based on.

That remains a very open question, and not only for Western viewers.

Noted Sandrock, “We have a large Asian population on campus. That includes a large Vietnamese population. I’ve seen some Vietnamese students step 3 feet into the door and say, ‘Oh, this is all Chinese!’ then turn around and walk out.

“For me that was an eye-opener,” Sandrock said. “I’m not absolutely sure I’ve presented something acceptable to all people.”

The show moves from Orange County to South Orange, N.J., in January. Several of the artists are from Southern California, including Strassberg of Los Angeles, Nancy Rupp of Ojai and Shiho Fujimoto of Hesperia. The lone Orange County contributor, Sinjyoung Choi, lives in Orange.

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If it’s surprising that Kim includes his own work in the show, he does not consider himself a curator, but merely a “gatherer.”

Kim’s “day job” is as a neurosurgeon at the Veterans Administration Hospital in the Bronx; he’s been there for 12 years. “I practice neurosurgery so I can afford to be a calligrapher,” he says. He plans to retire soon and move back to the home he still owns in Huntington Beach, where he’ll devote himself to calligraphy full time.

As for where calligraphy ceases to be calligraphy, Kim’s own work comes tantalizingly close.

“Kim has [areas of] total black up there,” Sandrock noted. “What we’re seeing in many ways is a version of what abstract artists were doing in the ‘50s.”

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“Art of Ink in America” is on display through Dec. 15 at the Fine Arts Gallery of Golden West College, 15744 Golden West St., Huntington Beach. Parking in Gothard Street lot. Open 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday, and 6 to 9 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday evenings. Free. (714) 895-8783 or (714) 895-8358.