CALLIGRAPHY IS BIG WITH ARTIST

The boulders hiding in the alcove of Tong Yang-tze's (right) Taipei apartment testify to this Taiwanese calligrapher's daunting perfectionism. They are paper - remnants of discarded artworks, crumpled together like used tissues and soaked into inky wads of pulp. Hundreds of old drafts of writing, including many of her efforts to draw Chinese poetry at a monumental scale, have been recycled into these rocks over the years, most recently as she worked on her commission for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which debuted on Nov 21.

Sometimes, when she does not like what she sees, she discards the calligraphy, adding to her collection of 17 boxes of the paper boulders, and starting again.

"She wrote more than 40 drafts for the Great Hall commission," said Dr Lesley Ma, the Met's associate curator of Asian art in the department of modern and contemporary art, who selected Tong for the project. "And she is always anxious because maybe she wrote something in September, but is not able to see it until October. She looks for what is right and wrong."