My practice treats calligraphy as

bodywork.

Foucault writes in Discipline and Punish about handwriting as a technology of control—how speed became the measure of a docile body, how children were trained to write quickly, efficiently, to produce legible script at pace. This logic persists: even now, calligraphy is often valorized for its speed of production, with swiftness mistaken for mastery.

I am interested in something else entirely.

Calligraphy is my somatic practice, the documentation of how my body moved.

Like an EKG tracking the heart’s rhythm, each stroke records the body’s own intelligence: the tremor, the steadiness, the breath held or released, the weight shifting from shoulder to elbow to wrist to fingertip.

Like a skate blade carving its path across ice, the mark left behind is evidence of balance, of momentum, of the body negotiating gravity and resistance.

The paper shows where I braced and surrendered. It captures the micro-adjustments of muscle and tendon, the body’s dialogue with the pen, the nib, the ink’s viscosity.

Yes, I care deeply about the precision of the mark but I care more about the skater with the beating heart and what summoned the confidence and hesitation that revealed themselves on paper.

This is calligraphy as breath work, as evidence, as a direct challenge to docility. To write this way is to refuse the demand that bodies perform predictably, efficiently. It is to insist that the body’s honest movement—with all its variations, accommodations, and particular genius—is worth recording, worth seeing, worth keeping.

I work primarily in Spencerian/Ornamental Penmanship, and Engrosser’s Script, and am known for my flourished script.

If you are drawn to work that treats pen work as an act of embodied resistance and presence, as an intimate way to develop a relationship with your body and psyche, I’d love for you to join me at Connie Chen Academy, where I’ve guided over 2,000 students in this practice.

If you’re looking for calligraphy that treats text as a living thing—work for ceremonies, commissions, or collaborations that honor the sacred in language—I’d love to connect.