How would you feel if you didn't read a single word of Chinese and you were facing a masterpiece of calligraphy in an art gallery?
You shouldn't be confused, depressed or embarrassed.
There are still plenty of ways to be a good connoisseur of Chinese calligraphy even though you may lose some of the poetic meaning conveyed by the characters themselves.
With your imagination, you can feel the subtle movement of the brush on the paper as if you yourself were creating the work.
With your eyes, you can observe the variation of the lines and dots and the shades of ink as if they were rivers, mountains and clouds.
With your heart, you can sense the musical rhythm and vibrant touches of the strokes as if they were lyrics from heaven and incarnations of human energy...
As a matter of fact, for a calligrapher as an artist, the meaning of words in a work is not what most concerns him or her - that is the business of writers and, indeed, some texts may not be poetic at all.
Anecdotes even recount that the Tang Dynasty master calligraphers Zhang Xu and Huai Su - who were famous for their wild, cursive style of calligraphy - often forgot which words they had just written and could not recognize the words soon after they had finished a work.
Calligraphy as art
Although traditionally regarded as the applied art of writing Chinese characters, Chinese calligraphy is above all a unique Chinese visual art of lines and dots, according to experts.
In an age when computers have taken the place of writing brushes, calligraphy will gradually lose its practical function as a means of communication to stand out eventually as an independent art form, according to Lee Wuh-kuen, director of the Taiwan Museum of Art in Taichung.
"What will the future of this oriental linear art be like and what is its significance in a modern era? It seems necessary to examine these topics from every possible dimensions," Lee told a recent conference held at his museum to discuss how the art of Chinese calligraphy can survive and develop in the 21st century.
The conference - entitled "Beyond 2001: A New Frontier Via Contemporary Calligraphy" - listened to seven academic papers delivered by scholars from the Chinese mainland and Taiwan: Gu Gan, Wu Wei, Yang Yingshi, Shih Tso-chen, Lai Shen-chon, Lin Li-erh, and Lo Ching. The two-day event attracted an enthusiastic audience of more than 300 people from across the island of Taiwan.
According to Taiwan scholar Shih Tso-chen, the system of Chinese characters is primarily pictographic and the art of calligraphy arose spontaneously from the writing of characters.
He added: "But calligraphy is not limited to words. On the contrary, it gives vitality to words."
Such a belief has actually been behind some artists on the Chinese mainland, in Taiwan and abroad who have attempted to make the art of calligraphy more visually striking while still writing nothing but Chinese characters.
These artists include Wang Fangyu, Tseng Yuho, Gu Gan, Wang Xuezhong, Yan Binghui, Wei Ligang, Shao Yan, Xu Yongjin, and Zhang Jianfu.
Inspired by Japanese modern calligraphy and Western abstract art from the early 20th century onward, the artists boldly apply colours, exaggerate the structure of characters or develop the pictographic and symbolic effects of words in their calligraphic experiments.
Gu Gan, a Beijing scholar and artist, said: "In my opinion, a good modern calligrapher needs to absorb all excellent visual cultural heritages to produce new calligraphic images, rather than mindlessly following traditional styles. Such inspiration comes from nature, calligraphic traditions as well as the composition and colouration of Western painting.
"What is essential is that the inspiration must be transformed into 'poetic images' to express the calligrapher himself and his understanding of life and nature," added Gu, who launched the "modern calligraphy" artistic movement on the Chinese mainland in the early 1980s.
Instead of writing with a traditional brush and ink on paper, some of the modern calligraphers experimented with new tools and media such as oil brushes, paint, boards and cloth as well. Artist such as Wang Dongling and Cai Mengxia incorporated modern techniques such as collage into their works.
In accordance with the structures of modern houses and the aesthetic tastes of modern people, the artists' works are often framed and often have a square composition, unlike the traditional vertical hanging scrolls or horizontal hand scrolls.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a number of artists on the mainland experimented with a new type of "calligraphy" by writing pseudo-characters - that is, characters they created by imitating the regular strokes and structures of Chinese characters.
They intended to demonstrate that Chinese calligraphy would still have aesthetic appeal, even if the characters they wrote were not Chinese and were meaningless.
These artists included Bai Qianshen, Xu Bing, Gu Wenda, Wu Shanzhuan, Qiu Zhenzhong, and Zhu Qingsheng.
Although the issue is still in dispute, there is no compelling argument that the two types of work cannot be classified as calligraphy.
Wu Wei, a scholar and artist from Shenzhen in South China's Guangdong Province, said: "I prefer to call them modernist calligraphy. By denying the semantic aspect of calligraphy, modernist calligraphy managed to fortify the calligraphic nature of calligraphy, forming such artistic languages as being expressive, structural, symbolic and abstract," Wu said in his paper.
Beyond calligraphy
But to develop new, modern faces for Chinese calligraphy is not the only concern of Chinese artists and scholars today.
Wu pointed out that calligraphy - both Chinese characters and the culture of Chinese calligraphy - is increasingly used as a resource in contemporary art.
Wu's opinion was echoed by Beijing scholar and journalist Yang Yingshi, who said there are at least three possibilities for calligraphy to develop in the future.
"First, calligraphy itself can develop into a new contemporary art that caters to the demands of a modern society. Second, calligraphic elements can be applied in other visual art forms such as abstract painting. Third, the art of writing Chinese characters as a unique cultural symbol can be used in contemporary conceptual art," Yang wrote in his paper.
According to Yang, such new trends can be already seen in recent works by mainland artists such as Gu Gan, Zhang Dawo, Wei Ligang, Pu Lieping, Yan Binghui, Shao Yan, Zhang Qiang, Wang Nanming, Zhu Qingsheng, Cai Mengxia, and Liu Chao. "But there is still much room for further experiments," he noted.
In some of the artists' works, the linear and visual quality of the images has been stressed. This makes the images more abstract, although authentic Chinese characters are still written. In other works, calligraphic elements are applied extensively in abstract paintings or three-dimensional art forms such as sculptures or installations. Still more works go to the extreme of conceptual art by criticizing the conventional mode of traditional calligraphy and they tap into the psychological and cultural depth of modern calligraphy.
Lo Ching - a Taipei-based scholar, poet and artist - said today's Chinese calligraphers and artists should pay more attention to aesthetic problems such as the attitude towards the existing influence of tradition, modernist trends of industrial society, and post-modernist trends in the information age.
It seems too early to say whether this stage in art history is good or bad luck for Chinese calligraphy. But it is certain that the traditional art needs to develop new life for a new century.
(China Daiy December 14, 2001)
