[Kyushu] Lintalow Hashiguchi

Shocked by punk rock music as a teenager, he began expressing himself using words in 2004. Lintalow was inspired by various postwar avant-garde art movements, especially by the ideas of Yuichi Inoue, a leading postwar Japanese calligrapher who said, “calligraphy is an art for all people.” Lintalow developed calligraphy as “the easiest art that can be created for free with paper and pencil” and “energy to live everyday life.” He writes in notebooks fragmentary words of inspiration that flash through his daily life, and the works that are born from the fusion and transformation of these fragments, like living creatures, are called “WORD MUTANT.” Using an inexpensive towel as a writing tool, he writes in a single boundless burst of speed in a high-speed punk manner, which gives his work an unusual presence in a modern world where letters are mere symbols to be typed on a screen or printed words on pages.