I shared a story with my group members about an illiterate mother and her son living in adjacent villages. When the mother visits her son’s house and he’s not home, she would find an object nearby, perhaps a stone of a certain shape or a kitchen utensil, and place it at her son’s doorstep to express the purpose of her visit. In this story, the object becomes the language.

We utilized objects from our surroundings as compositional elements, then established relationships between these objects to create words.

Chinese characters are a language that employs images as words. The earliest Chinese characters were pictographs depicting common objects, people, or animal. An image—or a character itself—inherently carries meaning.

quit/ withdraw

run

Even with two identical objects, by arranging them differently, the composed image can represent different words

A single object itself is a noun, but by arranging the spatial relationships between objects, we can create adjectives and verbs.

Adjectives: highlighting a certain state of an object, for example: tall / unstable / sharp

Adjectives: developing into a simple scenario to express emotions, for example: happy

Verbs: developing into a simple scenario to express actions, for example: chase / hit