The feelings of Chinese calligra

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The feelings of Chinese calligraphy

--how to make Kai Shu Chinese characters happy, angry, sad and laugh.

Lixin Wang

Abstract : Most calligraphers start to learn Chinese calligraphy by practicing Kai Shu. But as a fact, few people master Kai Shu, especially in nowadays. The main reason is due to the fact that most people don’t know how to make their Kai Shu calligraphy work alive. Kai Shu characters looks like dead bodies in most Kai Shu art works. Although Kai Shu is regarded as the strictest script, there is still a large space of freedom when writing Kai Shu calligraphy. In this paper, we will go through examples of Kai Shu calligraphy works to analyze how to make the characters alive. The examples include some characters from some famous master calligraphy works.

Although we might do a lot of work on the overall organization of an art work, we concentrate on character structures and shape of strokes in this paper. For the structure, we will talk about the weight center of characters. We will show how to make changes of the weight centers to make the characters alive. Furthermore, we will talk about how to change the structure to make it alive even we keep the weight center unchanged. The shape of strokes defines most part of a style. We will go through examples of different shapes of the same strokes and analyze the different movement of the brush (Bi Fa) to make the shapes. How well a person understands Bi Fa actually indicates how good a calligrapher he is. Bi Fa is almost the most difficult part of Chinese calligraphy art.

The essential difference of Chinese calligraphy art and Chinese character printing is like a person. Chinese calligraphy art is a alive person. An alive person can be smiling, angry, sad and laughing. On the other hand, Chinese character printing is like a dead person. That person will have no feeling expressed in his face.

One of the reasons that Chinese calligraphy could become a great art is the freedom of writing. Kai Shu is know as a strict script. But it by no means to say we don’t have much freedom when writing Kai Shu. Here we take one page of Yan Zhenqing’s “Yan Qin Li Bei” as an example of how to have the freedom of writing Kai Shu. There are 13 characters in the page. We are looking at the first half of a Heng (horizontal stroke). There are about 20 of them we can see clearly in this page. We can see the artist never repeat a way of writing that in the 20 same strokes (half strokes). Some of them are round (Jun, Shen, Bei). Some of them are sharp. Some of them hide the brush tip (Cang Feng). Some of them show the tip (Lu Feng). Even for the sharp ones, they have different shapes (Shang, Yan, Jun).

Kai Shu characters can be regarded as a standing person. Xing Shu can be regarded as a walking person. And Cao Shu can be regarded as a running person. A standing person has to be in a position relatively stable. A lot of people think the weight center has to be in the middle of the base line. In physics, we know that to be stable, an object’s weight center has to be inside the base. So to be stable, the weight center does not has to be in the center of the baseline. Actually in most Tang dynasty Kai Shu works, the weight center is in the middle of the base line. But we can actually see there are samples in Wei Bei calligraphy such that the weight center is not in the middle. It could on the left of the middle or on the right. If we look the picture on the left, we can see the weight center is on the right side of the baseline center. Let's look at a picture of He Lan Han Zao Xiang (picture on the right). We can see the weight center of the two characters are all on the left side of the baseline center. Now that it could be on the left and right of the center, we can change how much it is on the left or on the right to gain a variety. As long as the weight center is inside the baseline horizontally, the character is stable.

As to the vertical point of view, the weight center usually is a little above the middle height. This is just like a person. A person has more weight on the upper half when he is standing. One of the reason is that most Chinese characters has more strokes in the upper half than the lower half. But in creating Kai Shu works, this is not a policy. There are some examples with weight center located lower than the center of the height. Actually this is easy to understand. Because there are a lot of Chinese characters with more stroke on the lower half. Again if we look at the picture of Niu Jue Zao Xiang, the second character "Ren" has the weight center lower than the height center.

How do we write the stroke shapes? The basic technique can be seen in a lot of calligraphy introduction books.