Becoming Words: Opening Reception and Performance

Celebrate the opening of Becoming Words with an evening of art, conversation, and live performance by Hekiun Oda and Bahman Panahi.

The exhibition brings together two artists whose practices begin in distinct calligraphic traditions, Japanese Shodō and Persian Nastaliq, and move toward new forms of abstraction, embodiment, and connection. For both artists, a written word is not simply a symbol to be read. Through brush, ink, gesture, breath, sound, and rhythm, it becomes an experience.

Oda’s work considers calligraphy as a universal architecture of connection, shaped by the natural world and the energy of the body. Panahi’s Musicalligraphy brings Persian calligraphy into dialogue with music, abstraction, and ideas such as mehr: love, longing, and peace. Together, their works invite visitors to encounter words as conditions of presence, rain, water, music and love.

During the reception, both artists will create live calligraphic works, revealing calligraphy as a singular act made in the moment and impossible to repeat. Additional artist talks and workshops will be offered on separate dates throughout the exhibition.

This exhibition and event series is made possible through a collaboration between the Seldon Institute and the Heritage Museum of Asian Art.

Franco-Iranian artist Bahman Panahi was born in 1967. He holds a Ph.D. in music and musicology, he is a visual artist, calligrapher and musician.

From his early childhood, he has been sensitive to the calligraphies that punctuated his environment. His first calligraphic gesture was in the air, tracing a line in space. At a very young age, he understood that calligraphy is a living art, where gesture is combined with rhythm in the search for balance and a consonant harmony, seeking to sublimate sentences, words and letters, whilst revealing their melodic dimension. This poetic conception led him naturally to highlight the resonances of calligraphy and music. Inspired by these two artistic practices, he has made them his vocation. From his teenage years onwards, he devoted his studies to that purpose. He was instructed by the great Iranian masters. At the age of nineteen, he began teaching calligraphy; he became not only master calligrapher but also musician.

His studies took him to France, where he deepened his research and developed the concept of Musicalligraphy in his doctoral thesis at Sorbonne University. In his work, Bahman Panahi consistently endeavoured to bring out this conceptual dimension of calligraphy.

This artistic practice, comprising both traditional and abstract calligraphic compositions, has allowed him to travel: exhibitions, concerts, artistic performances around the world, exchanges with international artists have all waymarked Bahman Panahi’s life and have lent him international prominence.

At the same time, he continues to teach calligraphy. Throughout the world, he delivers courses, runs workshops and contributes to conferences in prestigious locations. In the wake of his teaching, a school of calligraphy has formed and developed informally, gathering together the students whom he has initiated.

Hekiun Oda is a Japanese calligraphy artist whose work treats each brushstroke as a singular, unrepeatable meeting of breath, body, ink, and spirit. Rooted in the classical tradition of shodō, his practice moves beyond writing to explore calligraphy as a visual language of mindfulness, peace, and human connection.

Born and raised in Kobe, Japan, Oda began studying calligraphy at age five under master Goun Katsura. He moved to Chicago in 1990, where he has continued to share Japanese calligraphy through exhibitions, live performances, and workshops. In 2009, he founded the Oda Calligraphy Association to teach calligraphy as both an art form and a meditative practice.

Oda’s recent work explores how written language can become a universal architecture of connection. In a cross-cultural calligraphic duet with a Persian calligrapher, he brings Japanese shodō into dialogue with Persian calligraphic traditions through shared ideas of movement, emotion, ink, and emptiness. His work has been exhibited and performed at the Japanese Culture Center of Chicago, McHenry County College, and the Heritage Museum of Asian Art, among other venues.