 In traditional calligraphy of many cultures, including Far Eastern, Islamic, Hebrew, and Roman, the transformation of words into beauty was inspired by revelations from the invisible world and the laws governing it. Ever since, scribes have been inspired by the truths and ideas of their religious and philosophical traditions, as well as by the beauty of nature and the trappings of worldly existence. Calligraphers in every culture cultivate writing as a discipline and art form. Such shared aspects are what make our exhibition worthwhile, providing a space of conversation between different calligraphy traditions, cultures, and scripts, which engage a broad range of artists, calligraphers, and calligraphy lovers to see and compare one another's tradition. In a multicultural region, such as the Bay Area, there are ever more and more communities who wish to explore the way in other culture things, speaks, prays, reads, and writes. If we think an intercultural conversation would be something worthwhile, quite often we must create something special, a special circumstance in which two or more members of the human family who have remained largely ignorant about the other or the others suddenly find themselves placed in the same room with a mediating voice encouraging them to speak. This is what we intend to do with calligraphies in conversation, bringing diverse calligraphy traditions together in one place, to stand face to face, and side by side, in hopes that they will have something to say to one another. On consideration, one must surely come to the conclusion that the different traditions represented in this exhibition, though technically warled apart, share one and the same origin and purpose. The reason we have beautiful writing, the literal meaning of calligraphy, is a need to express our beautiful thinking, that jewel in the crown of our humanity, an experience beyond all limits of language and culture, whether it be the thought of laws and love, of the miracles of nature or those of man's invention, if there was writing to express that people thought it to be beautiful, to do justice to the beauty of the message and transforming the written word into the art. Just a little bit background, so 2014, we had the exhibition at ICCNC and Oakland Cultural Center, OACC, both in downtown Oakland. So calligraphy in conversation is a traveling exhibition. Each year, we bring it to a different place, different community center, different public library, hopefully in the future, different museums. In 2014, we had over 80 artworks, mainly from Middle Eastern and Paristern traditions. But in 2015 onward, we opened the exhibition into other traditions and other scripts and cultures. In 2015, we had an exhibition at three places, ICCNC, OACC, and Oakland Public Library, and we had a variety range of different calligraphy traditions and scripts. 2016, we had a smaller exhibition at the Gallery of Fremont Art Association, which hosted the exhibition with 40 artworks. And the 2017, which we are very excited to open today and all are waiting to go upstairs on the sixth floor and visit, is having over 70 artworks from around the world. This is a map of the people who visited the website and the forum and try to submit artwork. You can see amazing calligraphers are living all around the world with different languages and we are really honored to have many of them being represented in this exhibition. We have over 50 artists and calligraphers being at this exhibition and I just want to take time and ask if any of the calligraphers, I know some faces of this exhibition are here. Would you mind please to just stand up and you would know your face. Thank you so much. We are really honored to have your works and it's really important to have local artists and international artists so this conversation will be more live and going on. And finally, I want to let you know that we have just launched the calligraphy and conversations website so previously it was being hosted at the ZR Center's website which is the leading organization of this exhibition but now we have the standalone website of the exhibition and hopefully we will have all the artworks over there with the descriptions and biographies and prices. The artworks here are for sale, we didn't mention any pricing in the library because we don't have to but they asked us to have an external resource for that so if people are willing to acquire artworks which I encourage you, they are very unique and great so you can visit the website calligraphy.org. Thank you so much. We will enjoy the rest of the presentations.