Hans Kisling studied Spanish and Chinese at the universities of Nijmegen, Amsterdam and Leiden, and Management Science at several institutions of higher education.
He is also a forming artist, a materdidact, (i.e. tutored by Emma Kisling, his sensitive, artistic mother). He had several extensive and impressive expositions of sens/sino/junk-art in The Netherlands: Franeker, Doorn, Leeuwarden, Enschede. Owing to his very innovative ideas he was nominated for the Dutch National Millennium Award in 2000. 

During his study Chinese he discovered his personal 'philosopher's stone': the answer to his cosmopolitan urge/vocation namely the immeasurable forest of universal images and associations in the Chinese script. With the aid of western and Chinese/Japanese sources he analyzed about 7000 characters, molded the result in a unique didactical form, thus creating the lexicon China-Y. 

Nominated for the Dutch National Millennium Award in 2000.

Chinese characters for everybody
Chinese characters for everybody... Chinese characters for nobody??? Modern Chinese characters can look quite forbidding. By unravelling their history and reconstructing their ancestry China-Y provides a guidebook into the magnificent world of symbols and images at the root of Chinese script.