Du Bing Jian (都兵剑), the lord of the Lying Cow Zhai, the head of the Jianlan living room, is a famous contemporary calligrapher, and his calligraphy works are called "Bing Sword Calligraphy". A fellow of the Republic of China, he was born at the top of Taihang In Lingchuan, Shanxi. After 20 years of military service, he founded the Beijing Hongdu Academy of Calligraphy and Painting to study, explore and inherit and carry forward traditional Chinese culture. He has published calligraphy collections such as "Hanmo Sword Love", "Bing Sword Calligraphy Collection", novella "Traces of Time", essay collection "Song on mobile phone", memoir "Bing Xing" and other literary and artistic works.
Calligraphy is an artistic expression of literary beauty unique to China and neighboring countries and regions that have been deeply influenced by Chinese culture. Including Chinese calligraphy, Mongolian calligraphy, Arabic calligraphy and English calligraphy. Its "Chinese calligraphy" is a traditional art unique to Chinese characters.
If calligraphy is defined from the point of view of art, it is not easy to understand calligraphy. In modern society, applied calligraphy is also quite important, but there is no hope for "applied calligraphy" on the basis of "cultural calligraphy".
For a long time, calligraphy has been mainly a unique art in East Asia, and the reason why it has encountered a crisis is because after Western modernist painting and other arts entered China, Japan, and Korea, calligraphy was suddenly classified as a genus of fine arts.
For example, some doctoral and master's students recruited by university calligraphy majors are attached to the art science. In this way, a problem arises: calligraphy has largely become a formal structural art, performance art, fine art modeling or non-literal art, and even some funny, showy "anti-art". This has led to the forcible incorporation of calligraphy into the Western system in the context of globalization, becoming a strange and bizarre art associated with Western performance art, pop aesthetics, and a range of postmodern art elements.
Calligraphy is a unique art in the Chinese character cultural circle, which is not found in the West. Calligraphy is calligraphy, and it makes no sense to replace or prescribe the law of instructions with Western humanistic arts.
Calligraphy must be understood in terms of its own environment and perspective. Ancient Chinese calligraphers, such as Su Dongpo and Huang Tingjian, had to cultivate their personality, learning, and cultural literacy before they began to write calligraphy, rather than entering calligraphy from external forms, techniques, and artistic compositions. Only those who have a real cultural background can engage in calligraphy. If you understand calligraphy in terms of Western artistic concepts, there is no future.
Some commentators believe that painting and calligraphy are the same body and evolved from calligraphy. At the same time, there is also the saying that books are born of painting. Books (words) are drawn in the same source, or books are drawn out of paintings, or paintings are mostly specious and plausible, which deserves to be carefully cleaned up. Ancient poetry and dance are "homogeneous", while books and paintings are different.
The peculiarity of hieroglyphs is that once a glyph is created, it becomes a relatively fixed note symbol. When Chinese characters reached the stage of maturity, they were no longer characterized by pictograms. Calligraphy became an independent art, long after Chinese characters became mature characters.
It can be said that as hieroglyphs gradually evolved from patterned figurative symbols to words composed of lines, people also improved their understanding of the expressiveness of the lines themselves, and gradually developed the technique of using brushes to form an independent calligraphic art. The process of the emergence and development of calligraphy art is the process of gradually completing the abstraction of Chinese characters, and the process of gradually and even completely getting rid of the image shackles of Chinese characters.
The fewer the pictographic factors of Chinese characters, the more mature the art of calligraphy and the stronger its expressiveness. It can be considered that the separation of books (words) from paintings occurs after human beings have created ideographic scripts, at which time pictures can be separated from words: "words" have become real concepts of "symbols", gradually fading the cloak of pictures; pictures have got rid of the shackles that words have imposed on their bodies, and have gradually evolved into "painting" (art) that match the name and reality.
For example, painters such as Wu Daozi of the Tang Dynasty and Fan Kuan and Ma Yuan of the Song Dynasty rarely wrote calligraphy, and there were almost no inscriptions or names on their paintings. In the Qing Dynasty, although the inscription appeared, we can only call it the painter's character, which is only a part of the painting, and cannot be called calligraphy.
Today, if calligraphers are regarded as inferior to painters, and let them pursue compositional, exaggerated, deformed, and even non-literal calligraphy, it is a wrong way. It is precisely in this regard that the ancient Chinese calligraphers Wang Xizhi, Ouyang Qian, Yu Shinan, Yan Zhenqing, Su Dongpo, etc., are all the unity of cultural and calligraphy. If you look at the characters of Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming, you will think that they are mainly thinkers and philosophers rather than calligraphers.
Many people think that Chinese characters developed from hieroglyphs, so it is not entirely true to say that "book" and "painting" are from the same source. In the concept of the primitive ancestors, words were promoted by the sense of communication between images, and words and images were different, so the statement that "calligraphy and painting are of the same origin" is also untenable.
The saying that "calligraphy and painting are of the same origin" began during the Wei and Jin Dynasties, when the literati still "rhymed" and understood calligraphy and painting with the concept of "rhyme". The artistry of calligraphy and painting lies in "rhyme", so this artistic concept is used to understand the "same origin of calligraphy and painting". It is possible to understand calligraphy from the perspective of the literati, but not from the concept of painting, or even from the Western concept of painting.
In addition, the most developed country in performance art is China, and some monks of the Tang, Song, Ming, and Qing dynasties have performed some strange acts in order to gain the Tao. They have realized the mystery of life, and it is very remarkable that they behave in such a strange way.
Now, Westerners use small people to express performance art, which is too shallow. The behavior of ancient Chinese monks is a very remarkable performance art. Ancient Chinese "performance art", calligraphy, and painting are consistent, so to understand calligraphy with this consistent Chinese culture, everything is solved. If this is not the case, it is not feasible to understand Chinese culture with foreign things. There is no doubt about the economic advanced nature of developed countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, but culturally, China, Japan, and South Korea are much more advanced than them. So the things in the Chinese cultural circle are to be understood in our own way.
In the sense that both calligraphy and painting are heart paintings, it is also spiritually possible to communicate with painting. Calligraphy and painting are all manifestations of inner spirituality, and they are portrayals of the talents of life. Books are heart paintings, paintings are also heart paintings, and the essence of books and paintings is to write hearts. Books and paintings are the result of "the creation of foreign teachers and the source of the heart in the middle", and they are all aesthetic realms created through the induction of heaven, earth and people to stimulate the subject's emotions, and then create through the virtual reality of the dot line. It's just that painting is "semi-abstract" art, while calligraphy is purely abstract music-like art.
Although calligraphy has tried to "visualize" the "calligraphy painting" in the innovation of "modern calligraphy", on the whole, calligraphy still reduces the reproduction factor to the minimum, and liberates it from the shackles of the object of expression, focusing on the expression of the subject, that is, its own feelings. Therefore, the writer expresses his feelings from the aspects of penmanship, pen strength, structure, cloth whiteness, momentum, charm, and artistic conception, without resorting to the simulation of concrete and real objects.
Promoting the spirit of calligraphy culture is not only a matter for calligraphers, but should be a matter of common concern for all literati and the entire cultural circle.
