Chinese Calligraphy

Calligraphy literally means ‘Beautiful Writing’ and has been accepted and acknowledged as an art form in various cultures throughout the world. But the ancient Chinese Calligraphy is unparalleled. Chinese calligraphy is a unique oriental art form to Asian cultures with a brilliant tradition as ancient as the culture itself. It is similar to painting and makes use of Chinese characters as an elementary vehicle to communicate and spread the divine world of the artist. All the way through, Calligraphy uses a basic media, brush handling techniques, scripts, presentation and style to express the emotions, culture, artistic/creative feelings, and moral principles of the artist to the readers who are overwhelmed by the power of application and the pleasure of beauty. Calligraphy is not just another way of writing Chinese characters, but also a beautiful, elaborate and a stylish art of interpretation and a branch of learning.

The origin of Chinese Calligraphy is not very precise. According to a tale in ancient Chinese history, Chinese calligraphy is approximately 4000 years old and originated during the reign of the Yellow Emperor a man named Cang Jie. Earlier periods of the Chinese history reveal that calligraphy was viewed as a matchless and independent visual art form rather than merely an ornamental art and was highly regarded over painting and sculpture, and paralleled alongside poetry as a means of self-expression and cultivation. Calligraphy became an art during the reign of Qin Dynasty and started to blossom in the Han Dynasty. Jin Dynasty saw the emergence of some great calligraphers, including Wang Xizhi and Wang Xianzhi. Achievements in the field of calligraphy were also seen in the North and South Dynasty and the calligraphy works in this period were called as Wei Bei. During the rule of Tang dynasty, calligraphy was taken more seriously; hence a lot of great calligraphers appeared during their reign, including Yan Zhenqing. With the fall of the Tang Dynasty, the decline of calligraphy began and the worst period was Ming Dynasty.

A brush, ink, paper and ink stone are the basic tools required to learn calligraphy. In order to learn calligraphy and to become a calligraphy expert, it is necessary to learn about these tools, select them carefully and take care of them and practice word by word and stroke by stroke. Chinese language has a set of different writing styles and scripts. The writing techniques basically revolve around the ways to hold and use the brush to write characters. The Chinese term qi bi implies beginning your stroke and the term shou bi means end your stroke. To write characters each stroke involves qi bi and shou bi.

The most effective and the traditional way of practicing handwriting comprises of three basic steps: mo, Lin and xie. Mo means tracing and to practice holding the brush. While practicing calligraphy, the main areas of focus should be stroke, structure and style of calligraphy. The next step, Lin is to put the model on the desk for you to copy and take a conscious approach to understand because mere copying never helps. After a few months of detailed study, the next step lin xie follows, wherein you have a specimen on a stone tablet of which you are required to make a copy on paper. It also involves studying the specimen ad memorizing strokes. To learn the rudiments of calligraphy is not too difficult. To become an expert calligrapher, the learner must spend at least a few years in learning and detailed study.

With a history in between four to five thousand years, Chinese calligraphy is rich, thoughtful, and far-reaching in content and has been admired and has received the utmost attention of the artists worldwide. Most recently, industrial art has adapted the elements of traditional calligraphy. The best example of application of Chinese calligraphy in modern times is the Lucent logo, a red circle done with a Chinese brush denotes the 0-bit of machine language. In this era of supercomputers and artificial intelligence, it is heartening to see the free form calligraphy reign

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