There are several obvious controversies in contemporary calligraphy, the first is the controversy between tradition and innovation, the second is the relationship between art and writing, and the third is the relationship between official position and level. In the eyes of many people, as long as the picture is very "dirty, messy, poor" is an artistic thing, as long as the writing is very neat, it is not calligraphy, as long as you hold an official and a half-position in the book association, you think that its calligraphy level must be very high.
The situations listed above actually illustrate a problem, that is, many people are ignorant or ignorant of calligraphy. What does contemporary calligraphy pursue? Where is it headed? Only when we understand these questions will we have an understanding of calligraphy.
From the essential meaning of calligraphy. The ancients' understanding of calligraphy at first came from its "shape", for example, the oracle bone is a kind of shape script, and later there is also the meaning, and other book styles eventually come to the top of the meaning. The earliest surviving bibliographic treatise records Wang Xizhi's views on the "meaning" of calligraphy. He said that "there is a intention between dot paintings" and "the meaning of the book turns deeper", etc., all of which are saying that calligraphy is meant to express a kind of "meaning". During the Northern Song Dynasty, the literati regarded writing as a kind of "game", a pastime game for the literati after tea and dinner, and finally had the calligraphy history of "Song Shangyi".
And the Tang Dynasty people pay attention to the "law", calligraphy has the meaning of the law, it and the Qin "system" in some levels are more similar, the Qin Dynasty unified the text, on the one hand, the daily work and life needs, on the other hand also shows that this system is strict, is to require people to follow the same system, write a standardized text; the Tang Dynasty is similar, because the Tang Dynasty took the writing of the standard character as a necessary condition for the examination, although we know that calligraphy also had the emergence of "affection" and "intention" in the Tang Dynasty. For example, Zhang Xu's wild grass works express sentiments in this way, but Zhang Xu, as an official at that time, his handwriting during the examination was also very remarkable, and the "Tang Shangfa" also had a universal basis.
But in any case, whether it is "law" or "meaning", calligraphy still has to aim at achieving meaning in the end.
From the perspective of contemporary colleges and universities, the call for calligraphy to reach its meaning is getting higher and higher, and it will continue. In many colleges and universities, most of them have opened calligraphy courses, especially some specialized art academies, and calligraphy majors are also a trend. Wang Yong of the Central Academy of Fine Arts once said that calligraphy is not as simple as writing, it is an art, and art has uniqueness and emotion, and it is to express some of the cognition and emotions of the creator.
When more conservative teachers study and lecture on calligraphy, they also look at this problem from a philosophical point of view. Calligraphy is the essence of Chinese culture, carrying Chinese culture and expressing Chinese wisdom. The so-called Chinese culture is, in the final analysis, Chinese philosophy, and Chinese philosophy is actually a contradictory relationship. Therefore, some teachers attach great importance to this problem in the lectures, such as the size, thickness, positive side, square circle, denseness, black and white in calligraphy, etc. As long as these contradictions are used well in calligraphy works, there will be no major problems.
How to make good use of these contradictions in calligraphy works? In fact, it is "to make the work full of contradictions, and ultimately to achieve harmony and unity", that is, to learn the method of "creating contradictions and resolving contradictions", which is a problem that some college teachers attach great importance to.
From the practical level, calligraphy has undergone fundamental changes from the "heat" of the 80s to the current blossoming of a hundred flowers, which is also the progress of calligraphy in continuous exploration. Looking back now, the national calligraphy competition held in the 80s, the works at that time, almost all of them were mainly "writing", and there were not many "artistic" things, including the works of the older generation of calligraphers, whose works were almost all "writing".
Until recent years, calligraphers seem to have found the "meaning" in their continuous exploration, and they have followed suit and created a variety of works with "calligraphy", which greatly increases the artistry of calligraphy. But among them, there are also some people who bring the elements of fine art into calligraphy, and some people also mix Western art into calligraphy works, so that calligraphy takes on different forms. Some people also use brushes different from those created by the ancients to write, but use needles, mops, knives, spoons and other tools to write, in order to achieve a certain artistic expression effect.
No matter from which level, people want to achieve the performance effect of "intention" and "emotion" in calligraphy, and these methods and methods are the same as the views of ancients such as Wang Xizhi.
Calligraphy is the invention of the ancients, but the ancients did not create a large scale and a large scale as they do today. Nowadays, in the case of great material abundance, people can expand the site to create, and in the large field, large space to create, whether calligraphy can express the meaning, is another matter.
From these levels, the future direction of calligraphy is still based on the main tone of ideography, so as to distinguish calligraphy from writing, which is the general trend. However, calligraphy is also based on the writing of Chinese characters, so writing is still the basis of calligraphy and the only way to learn calligraphy. However, calligraphy education and training will also become an important issue in future calligraphy matters, and only when people's understanding of calligraphy is improved will the aesthetic value of calligraphy be universally recognized.