Text: Liu Hui
Han Tianyong is one of the few calligraphers in China who is proficient in paleography and good at mastering the creation of Yin Shang oracle bones, two-week golden script, and Spring and Autumn Warring States stone carvings.
Ancient
Extend the vitality of calligraphy
Extraordinarily enchanting!
You see, the scenery of "northern scenery, thousands of miles of ice, thousands of miles of snow" seems to travel through time and space, and they are floating and falling in the jiangnan water town in summer.
It's fascinating!
Admire the oracle bones, gold texts, stone drum texts, small seals, and books scattered in the large and small spaces of the Zhejiang Exhibition Hall, filled with a strong ink fragrance.
Extra dazzling!
In the crowd, Han Tianyong, who speaks the northeast dialect, faces the works with high breath and full temperament, and tells the audience about the creative process to the audience.
In my decades of artistic career, Mao Zedong's poetry has been an important part of my calligraphy creation. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, Han Tianyong created 37 poems of Chairman Mao in ancient calligraphy, totaling more than 60 pieces. The works involve the oracle bone, jin wen, stone drum text, small seal, shu shu and other pre-Qin ancient script systems, with a scale ranging from six feet to a huge scale, all of which are recent masterpieces, which is a phased summary of his teaching and creation in Chinese art for more than thirty years.
Looking around the exhibition hall, Han Tianyong's most praiseworthy thing is that he has learned kung fu in calligraphy, only to see the natural flow of pen and ink on rice paper, so that the viewer has a sense of sitting and watching the sea, and has a sense of endless reverie.
Looking around, the appearance of Han Tianyong's seal book works seems to have brought people's thoughts to the distant Shang Zhou, but what people feel is a historical and modern artistic enjoyment.
The seal book is the oldest type of book on the mainland, including oracle bones, large seals and small seals. In addition to the fragmentary oracle bones, the oldest brushwork of Chinese calligraphy is called the seal introduction used in the Great Seal of the Shang and Zhou Dynasties.
In Han Tianyong's eyes, during the Yin Shang period, the oracle bone with knife carving as the form of writing and the Zhong Ding script with casting as the means of casting and engraving had gradually merged in line form, especially in the early Western Zhou Dynasty, with the decline of the oracle bone, the Zhong Ding script began to move towards the forefront of calligraphy art and became the mainstream of its development.
However, it is worth noting that the rise of Zhong Dingwen does not mean that the calligraphy art with knife carving as a means of writing has come to an end, on the contrary, because of the growth of Zhong Dingwen, Chinese calligraphy art has a new form of expression.
Since then, two calligraphy art forms with knife carving as a writing instrument and casting as a writing method have emerged, and it is their mutual promotion and development that promotes Chinese calligraphy art to break through the shackles of a single writing method style type, and since then it has moved towards a historical period of innovative development and diversification of aesthetic styles.
Today, Han Tianyong's ancient calligraphy is presented in a new space: the artist's creation not only needs to look at the tradition, but also needs to look at the heart - after laying a good foundation in the traditional fields of truth, grass, li, seal and so on, Han Tianyong specializes in the creation of ancient calligraphy, combining oracle bone, gold and cursive very well.
At present, Han Tianyong is also one of the few calligraphers in China who is proficient in paleography and good at mastering the creation of Yin Shang oracle bones, two-week golden script, and Spring and Autumn Warring States stone carvings.
As Shen Hao, vice president of the China Academy of Art, said, Professor Han Tianyong has devoted himself to the research and creation of ancient Chinese calligraphy for decades, working hard and tirelessly. In many fields of calligraphy practice, the research and creation of ancient calligraphy is relatively more of an expeditionary road, and the lonely road must be left on the road of chinese civilization genes, the source of Chinese character culture, and the Chinese aesthetic spirit, and grasp the iron with marks, in order to lay enough cornerstones for artistic creation.
Rational research, perceptual creation, to see their own appearance in the creation of ancient calligraphy, to create their own spirit, is a brave road that needs to cross thousands of mountains and rivers - Han Tianyong chose this path. Not afraid of the difficulties of the expedition, but seeking "after the three armies to be open" to continue to self-transcendence.
Ancient culture
Embed the growth of memories
It was 1957, Han Tianyong was born in Shenyang into a family of scholars, and his father's work at the Palace Museum in Shenyang was the earliest artistic enlightenment for Han Tianyong.
"My father often wrote some exhibition instructions, and the registration and bibliography were all written in small letters with fly heads, and often brought home this work that had not been done during the day at night, so when I was very young, I watched my father write brush characters. Later, before I went to elementary school, he asked me to write a hundred words a day in Liu Gongquan's "Secret Pagoda Stele". In addition to the enlightenment of calligraphy, his father also taught Han Tianyong a lot of literary knowledge, and this kind of professor is not a crammed indoctrination, his father through a unique way, so that Han Tianyong in the happiness of absorbing a lot of literary nutrition, this way of learning, so that he still benefits a lot decades later today.
"When I was a child, my father often recited Tang poems and Song poems, and the tune he sang, unlike what we say now, was an ancient pronunciation chant." Therefore, Han Tianyong has been influenced by such a culture since he was a child.
Han Tianyong, who wanted to achieve something in art, later entered the Calligraphy and Seal Engraving major of the China Academy of Art and pursued a master's degree.
At the age of 23, he studied art with Shen Yanyi, Yang Renkai, Feng Yue'an, Huo Anrong, and other of China's top calligraphers and painters and ancient character experts.
At the age of 31, he studied under The Chinese calligraphy giant Sha Menghai and Professors Liu Jiang and Zhang Zuan, and obtained a master's degree in literature. Since then, he has been lecturing, lecturing and engaging in cultural exchange activities at various universities in Japan for eight consecutive years.
"Professors Sha Menghai, Liu Jiang, Zhang Zuan, etc. at the China Academy of Art have had a profound impact on me." Han Tianyong said that Sha Menghai's teachings to him are still vividly remembered.
"When I was in graduate school, I went to Sha Menghai's house a lot, and I can say that I went almost every two weeks in the first year." Han Tianyong still remembered Sha Lao's teaching: If you want to specialize in the art, you must penetrate deeply in a certain field, rather than stop at a shallow taste.
During his master's degree, Han Tianyong studied calligraphy and seal engraving with his amazing perseverance, especially the calligraphy and seal engraving that spread to China overseas. When he was a graduate student at the China Academy of Fine Arts, the Shanghai Calligraphy and Painting Publishing House published Han Tianyong's first book, "The Art of Japanese Seal Engraving".
In his teaching career of more than 20 years after graduation, Han Tianyong has opened courses such as the history of Chinese calligraphy, the history of printing, the selective reading of historical calligraphy, the history of Japanese calligraphy, and the history of Japanese seal engraving in the Department of Chinese Painting and the Department of Calligraphy, and systematically studied and studied the theories of this discipline.
Oracle is a distinctive symbol of the millennium Chinese civilization and an important contribution of the Chinese nation to human civilization.
"In order to inherit the ancient art of writing, the China Academy of Art first established the Oracle Bone Literature Society, that is, the China Academy of Art Ancient Character Calligraphy Research Center, which is a teaching supporting research institution corresponding to the modern calligraphy research center." Han Tianyong said that in 2012, the Zhejiang Oracle Bone Literature Society was established, which gathered experts and scholars from Zhejiang and even China who have made outstanding achievements in the field of paleography research and ancient script calligraphy creation.
Liu Jiang, the first president of the Zhejiang Oracle Bone Literature Society, is a senior professor at the China Academy of Art and the executive president of the Xiling Printing Society, who has inherited and developed the calligraphy teaching tradition of the China Academy of Art for nearly 50 years. The Zhejiang Oracle Bone Literature Association has a strong academic authority and can also be said to be an important institution in the great development of a party's cultural industry.
Since Han Tianyong served as the president of the Zhejiang Oracle Bone Literature Society, the Society has held a number of national ancient calligraphy exhibitions, such as Ruian's "Sun Yi Rang Cup - National Oracle Bone Calligraphy Competition", Haining's "Commemoration of the 140th Anniversary of Mr. Wang Guowei's Birth - National Ancient Calligraphy and Seal Engraving Exhibition and Thesis and Documentation Exhibition", and hosted the "Into inheritance - Commemorating the 100th Anniversary of the Discovery of Oracle Bone Luo Zhenyu Luolin Oracle Bone Calligraphy Art Exhibition and Oracle Bone Academic Forum".
In 2021 alone, Han Tianyong held three major exhibitions on ancient seal books and pottery printing art at the Xiling Printing Art Museum, Zhejiang Exhibition Hall, and Shaoxing Keqiao Art Museum.
Ancient Chinese characters
Let the world of Han Mo perfume
Known to the art world, Professor Han Tianyong has been lecturing at Gifu Women's University in Japan for nearly 12 years. He lectured in fluent Japanese, and expressed accurately and beautifully in the interpretation of grammar and rhetoric, calligraphy terms, and classical poetry.
During this period, Han Tianyong held academic lectures on the origin of Chinese characters, an introduction to Chinese culture, pre-Qin paleography, Chinese calligraphy and seal engraving, and the art of Chinese ink painting at many well-known universities such as Hokkaido University in Japan, Daito Bunka University in Japan, and the University of Tsukuba in Japan, as well as the "Mainichi Calligraphy Exhibition" group that gathered top peers.
The cultures of China and Japan have such close roots that they are in the same vein in the writing of Chinese characters. As a professor at the China Academy of Art, Han Tianyong worked hard with his own strength, and for thirty years, he finally achieved positive results.
This is a "History of Japanese Calligraphy" written from the perspective of Chinese scholars, and its solid foundation comes from the author's heavy materials and in-depth examination collected in the shuttle between China and Japan for more than 20 years. During this period, in addition to daily teaching, lectures, and judging, Han Tianyong also visited many Japanese art galleries, museums, and reference rooms, and obtained a large number of first-hand Research Materials on Japanese Calligraphy literature through the help of his teachers and friends, such as Lingxue Imai, Doru Kobayashi, Mei Fu, and Inamura Yundong, which provided strong support for the writing of this book.
The narrative of the history of calligraphy in the book has gone through the ancient, Asuka, Nara, Heian, Kamakura, Southern and Northern Dynasties, Muromachi, Edo, Meiji, Taisho, and Showa periods, with a large span of time and a lot of detailed content. Japanese calligraphy culture occupies a place in the Chinese character culture circle, although it started late, but through the exchange and dissemination of sui history and Tang envoys, it gradually formed its own unique beauty of writing, and Chinese calligraphy is of the same origin and different streams, accompanied by different and different. A dignified and heavy, with subtle beauty; a romantic and colorful, with a flamboyant attitude.
In modern times, scholars such as Yang Shoujing, Luo Zhenyu, and Wang Guowei have learned from each other's cultures, and wu Changshuo, Zhao Zhiqian, Xu Sangeng and other scholars have influenced the art of Japanese calligraphy and seal engraving, coupled with Japan's learning from the West since the Meiji Restoration, which has accelerated the opening of its modern calligraphy. The presentation, reflux and exhibition of cultural relics and pictures, rare books can also open the eyes and feast the eyes of domestic viewers, and the cultural exchange between Chinese and Japanese calligraphy is also a place where the author pays a lot of ink.
The mutual use of data needs to be based on the author's deep understanding of the two Chinese, and only by breaking through "The limits of my language" can we break through "The limits of my world". Professor Han Tianyong is proficient in Chinese and Japanese, and relies on his profound skills to easily capture documents and express them in a simple and simple way. This kind of expression is not a simple word-by-word translation, but an academic re-creation based on the perspective of Chinese scholars after in-depth digestion and borrowing from new achievements.
For more than ten years, Han Tianyong has used his lecture vacation to examine ancient temples in Japan, visit senior monks, and record and sort out materials and historical materials. His doctoral dissertation "Sino-Japanese Zen Inkblot Research" won the National "Eleventh Five-Year" Social Science Art Fund Award; his works such as "Buddhist Writing Sutra", "Three Strokes and Three Traces", and "Zen Inkblot" published by China Academy of Art Publishing House have been republished five times; "Japanese Seal Engraving Art", published by Shanghai Calligraphy and Painting Publishing House in 1996, was reprinted and distributed by Guangxi Fine Arts Publishing House in 2019.
Such fruitful academic achievements have attracted the attention and praise of the Japanese calligraphy community. Mr. Shusaku Ono, a well-known Japanese calligrapher and historian, spent nearly a month translating Han Tianyong's "Inkblots of Sino-Japanese Zen Buddhism" of nearly 10,000 words, which was published in Japan's top calligraphy magazine "Calligraphy Research", with a wide influence.
He is the stone of the mountain and can attack jade. The History of Japanese Calligraphy, which contains hundreds of thousands of words and more than 100 exquisite pictures, will bring us the latest interpretation and unique interpretation of the history, culture, art, philosophy, society and other aspects related to Japanese calligraphy.
Han Tianyong
Famous calligrapher, seal engraver, epigrapher, calligraphy educator, professor and doctoral supervisor of the School of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy Art of china Academy of Art, director of the Research Center for Calligraphy Creation of Ancient Characters of China Academy of Art, president of Zhejiang Oracle Bone Literature Society, librarian of Zhejiang Provincial Museum of Culture and History, correspondence review expert of master's and doctoral dissertations of degree and graduate education development center of the Ministry of Education, distinguished professor of Gifu Women's University in Japan, distinguished professor of Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts, distinguished professor of Shanghai University School of Fine Arts, He is a researcher at the Institute of East Asian Buddhist Culture at Zhejiang Gongshang University, a member of the Chinese Calligraphers Association, and a member of the Xiling Printing Society.