With the exhibition Alessandro Cardinale. Nüshu - Writing the Void, the Museum of Oriental Art in Venice offers a glimpse into contemporary artistic production between Italy and China. The project, in collaboration with Arte Italiana, explores the culture of different populations in China through the contemporary reinterpretation by Alessandro Cardinale, an Italian artist who, in China, managed to capture the attention of the public and critics, securing the 1st Prize at the V Beijing International Art Biennale in 2012.

Curated by Anna Lisa Ghirardi and Marta Boscolo Marchi, director of the Museum of Oriental Art, the exhibition presents ten sculptural works, including five unpublished pieces created specifically for the exhibition, inspired by the territories of Hunan, the women of the Yao culture, and their hermetic writing. In the halls of the Museum of Oriental Art, the artist chose to "write the void," creating, through thin strips of shaped canvas or using parallel iron rods, an image capable of appearing and disappearing based on the visitor's position in space. The gaze recreates, through the rhythm and geometry of the elements, a non-existent reality, following the rules of proximity and continuity of perception. The female faces, captured in a reflective and private attitude, and the mountain landscapes of the province of Hunan vanish at the first step into space, just like the words of the Yao women, long considered unacceptable and therefore, for official culture, entirely non-existent.

The void that inspires the title of the exhibition and the nonexistent words are those written in nüshu: a syllabic script exclusively used by women that, starting from the end of the Qing dynasty, in Jiangyong County, Hunan, merged with the rich linguistic polyphony of the mountainous areas of Guangxi, Guizhou, Hunan, and Guangdong, where two million Yao people still live today, speaking different languages and not always mutually intelligible dialects.