In a word, just like all arts can't be discarded-spirituality. A creator should pay attention to his inner spiritual activities, not just his mastery of forms and techniques. Of course, in my opinion, calligraphy is called art because it borrows people's "writing behavior" and transforms it into a expressive aesthetic creation; In contrast, painting is a kind of "painting behavior".
For a long time, the correlation between calligraphy and modern life culture has been the focus of your exploration. My question is: in the face of such a huge subject, where do you start?
I can't help but tell my story briefly: I fell in love with calligraphy when I was a teenager, and the paintings of the Academy of Fine Arts more or less revealed my personal concern for identity. A batch of ink paintings I created after graduation mainly reflected my thoughts on Chinese culture in Malaysia. These works are profound, rigorous and laborious, but I just feel that they are not direct enough.
On the other hand, I have been in the habit of reading The Creation and Discussion of Malaysian Chinese Literature for a long time. What impressed me most was Chen Dawei's Nanyang Poems, such as Jiabidan and Guild Hall. Poetry is obviously the art of language, and his poems fully express my feelings-his historical narrative, his cultural feelings, and his memory of the growth of all ethnic groups in this area are so similar to mine. -So an idea came to mind: Can you turn his poetic scene into my calligraphy?
Soon, many experimental works were produced, including poems by many contemporary Malaysian Chinese poets, except Chen Dawei. In terms of technical difficulty, my experience is that I can never touch my heart in the process of writing. If we use traditional style and format to express it, it will naturally produce a kind of rejection, that is to say, although you copied a modern poem, the viewer often turns a blind eye to the relevant content, and even thinks that using a brush is very long and ancient. Later, I also found that our living habits always dominate everyone's thinking and judgment. For example, like a poem, when it is displayed in front of readers, there is no trace of writing, but it has become a square and neat printing. This tempted me to look for a deeper relationship.
2. The level and structure of calligraphy art..
"Word group" intermediary. "Word group" refers to a whole artistic image composed of two or more words in cursive works. The so-called "wholeness" refers to the connection of point-line movement between words, or the connection of point-line modeling between words, which must be one of them. "Zi Zu" came into being in the highly artistic "close-to-body" process of Jin Dynasty, which embodies the artistic characteristics of calligraphy. "Word group" also has two dimensions: time sequence and simultaneity, so it can be divided into four basic types: (1) word groups connected by dotted lines with dynamic stroke order; (2) the static result of dot-connected phrases; (3) modeling word groups with dynamic dashed lines in stroke order; (4) Static results of word groups modeled by points, lines and surfaces. To a great extent, "word group" breaks through the structural limitation of a single word and embodies the pursuit of close connection between "word" and "word" in calligraphy creation. There were more than ten cursive characters in Wang Duo in the Ming Dynasty, but of course, the "word group" was limited, that is, the word line. Taking "word group" as the intermediary between "word" and "word line" can deepen our understanding of the relationship between words, the composition of word line, and "style", "form" and "structure" We don't regard "word group" as a hierarchy, mainly considering the universality of calligraphy theory, that is to say, there is no "word group" in the works of Zhuan, Li, Kai and Li. ( 15)
The above discussion on the overall composition of calligraphy works is only brief, limited by space, and cannot be demonstrated and analyzed in detail. Finally, I want to make a necessary explanation of the research ideas and methods of this paper. First, the author's exploration of calligraphy works has always been based on the form of calligraphy works, and the four basic levels and two intermediaries of the overall composition have morphological characteristics. On the one hand, the sensibility directly related to form is the foundation for the existence and development of all arts. On the other hand, form-based analysis and generalization can make theoretical research observable and verifiable. It is true that ancient calligraphy theory emphasized "from technology to Taoism", and "Shen Cai is the most important, followed by form and quality". This value orientation and evaluation are indeed the characteristics of China's calligraphy art, but the understanding based on form is not the same as the supremacy of form, just as the study of form is not the same as formalism. Under the modern academic background, the study of literary theory must be hierarchical and step by step. It is a reasonable research strategy to study the theory of calligraphy works by basically understanding the "internal relationship" of works and then exploring the "external relationship" of works. Secondly, calligraphy works are a loose collection of "characters" or "word groups" and an organic whole of artistic images, but the overall picture is not. To explore the internal relations of calligraphy works, including the hierarchical structure, we must fully respect this feature and cannot simply apply the models and methods of other works of art theories. Simply put, it is impossible to pursue the strict unity of the internal logic of multi-level structure at the expense of the object characteristics of calligraphy works. The characteristics of calligraphy works determine the internal logic of the theory of calligraphy works.
3. The development of calligraphy art is always based on the achievements of predecessors, and the foundation of predecessors is the so-called tradition. No one can leave the tradition to realize his own so-called innovation. Childhood is the foundation of teenagers, teenagers are the foundation of youth, and all childhood, adolescence and youth are the foundation of adulthood. No one can go beyond a certain stage and grow directly from childhood to adulthood. The record of the Olympic Games is also growing. If you break the record of the Olympic Games 50 years ago, in fact, you have not made any progress in the Olympic Games record. What are you talking about? Only when you broke the new record of the last Olympic Games will your innovation be real and meaningful.
The original Olympic record should change quickly, but now it is difficult to improve it bit by bit. Even so, no one proposes to scrap all the previous records and start over, because everyone knows how absurd it is to scrap the previous Olympic records and start over.
In the Qing Dynasty, the phenomenon of China's calligraphy worshipping monuments and suppressing posts led to the stagnation of calligraphy art, which occupied more than 300 years in the history of China. From a historical point of view, calligraphy took one or two thousand years from infancy to juvenile seal script, one or two thousand years from Qin and Han dynasties to Tang dynasty, and more than two thousand years to mature. What does it matter from a historical point of view? Just as a person occasionally makes mistakes in the process of growing up, pretending to be naive will not have any subversive significance.
It is inevitable that the art of calligraphy will continue to develop. Today's express delivery is like a mature man standing there in his thirties. He won't be silent, and he's bound to make great achievements. This great achievement is not to return to one's childhood, but to one's youth. Childhood and youth can be beautiful memories of life, and should not be the goals pursued by life.
The development of an art is not a person's career, but the product of an era. With the efforts of all relevant people, there will be several outstanding people as the representatives of the times in each era, but the development of art is not only related to these outstanding people. The so-called heroes come out of the times. In today's era of mixed fish and dragons, real heroes will come out, but they will never be decadent, anti-traditional, cultural speculators who advocate abandoning all traditional contents, or cultural hooligans, but people who inherit the tradition in a down-to-earth manner, can see the direction with wide eyes, see the road clearly, have insights, real scholars and real lofty ideals.
4. Re-creation of art-appreciation of calligraphy
Calligraphy, as a representative of visual culture, has a long history and profound aesthetic cultural accumulation. When you appreciate calligraphy for the first time, you must understand a problem: calligraphy and writing are two completely different concepts, just like driving and car performance are different. So generally speaking, there are fewer people who really understand calligraphy. Shen once said: Calligraphy is "colorless and brilliant pictures, silent and harmonious music." The ancients also said: Calligraphy is a "silent voice, an invisible image". Therefore, the expression of this aesthetic feeling of calligraphy is to express a very rich aesthetic feeling in a very simple form, so it is extremely difficult to create calligraphy, and it is even more difficult to appreciate calligraphy. Because it is far more difficult to understand China's calligraphy than Chinese painting, it is far more difficult to become a calligrapher than a painter in China.
Calligraphy, as a visual art, should be the patent of Chinese characters, which is determined by the unique structure and profound connotation of Chinese characters. The practicality and literariness of Chinese characters are irreplaceable and incomparable by any writing. This is also the reason why it, as a traditional art form in China, has spread to this day, affecting many countries in the world, especially Southeast Asian countries. Calligraphy is based on the characteristics of Chinese character modeling, using brush as a special writing tool, through artistic conception and mobilizing artistic techniques. The appreciation of calligraphy is not only to understand the ingenuity and skill of the works in stippling, structure and composition, as well as the author's inheritance, genre and style, but more importantly, to feel the temperament, emotion and aesthetic pursuit of the calligrapher through the works. Calligraphers create with their hands and thoughts, and appreciators also rely on their eyesight and thoughts to dig and discover the life and soul contained in their works. Just as beautiful things exist because there are many aesthetic eyes, they exist and are in contrast with each other. So appreciating calligraphy is also a re-creation. The effect of this re-creation depends on the knowledge, cultivation, experience and mood of the viewer.
China's calligraphy has two lines. One is line drawing, such as the cursive script of Huai Su and Zhang Xu in the Tang Dynasty, which is an extremely line drawing art with pure lines to the extreme. Make full use of the dynamic and imposing manner of lines, dilute and weaken the meaning of stippling, and get rid of its triviality, thus showing elegance and free and easy, giving people a heartfelt momentum. Song people commented that "sorrow is greater than heart death." Today's great man Mao Zedong belongs to this style. The other line is pay attention to stippling. For example, Tang Kai's highly mature and perfect statutes have reached the peak, and his aesthetic expression is also different. Representative figures are Ou (), Yu (Heather), Jun (Sui Liang), Yan (Zhenqing) and Liu (Gong Quan). The difference between stippling and linearization is that stippling is more symbolic, while linearization is close to nature, just like watching "a frightened snake enters the grass and a lost bird leaves the forest", and getting inspiration directly from nature. At this time, calligraphy is very similar to painting, and it is very similar to pictographic retrieval of painting, but it still depends on the carrier of Chinese characters. Sun's "Book Score" said: "As thin as a new moon on the horizon, it seems to fall among the stars. If you guide it, you will note it in spring, but you will not guide the mountain. " This beautiful text describes the method of image creation, that is, "close your eyes as if you were in front of you."
5. The artistic meaning of calligraphy works.
Mr. Shen, a modern calligrapher, is right. It is universally acknowledged that China's calligraphy is the highest art, because it can show amazing miracles, colorless, bright pictures, silent and harmonious music and make people appreciate it.
The ancients said that calligraphy is the art of the soul. Words are like people, books are like people, words express their meaning, and every word is a vivid life. Every bit of painting is the condensation of hard work. Without heart, there is no morality. The dotted line form has lost its meaning. Writing is an important carrier of national culture and a remarkable symbol of human civilization. Writing well is the requirement of inheriting civilization, and writing well is the urgent need of demonstration. Characters store the spirituality of Chinese ancestors and show the wisdom of the Chinese nation.
Calligraphy casts a calligrapher's personality, which embodies the will of nature.
China's traditional culture is rich and colorful and must be handed down from generation to generation for a long time. If you can only type on the keyboard and can't write with a pen, you are ashamed of history and your ancestors.
If a friend takes pains to practice good handwriting, you will master the golden key to open the door to happiness, which will certainly add luster to your work and life, cultivate sentiment, develop mind and temper will.
Chairman Mao said that practicing calligraphy is a way to strengthen the brain and body, and practicing calligraphy is an active pastime, entertainment and rest. Practice, practice, and develop excellent skills of serving the people.
6. Art appreciation is a complicated psychological process, because it contains two factors: subjective people and objective works of art, and so does appreciating calligraphy. Different people in the same work will have similar feelings, not exactly the same, or even the opposite, because of different subjective factors. Therefore, to appreciate calligraphy, we must have some knowledge of calligraphy and some related qualities, so that we can have good calligraphy appreciation ability in preschool education. Calligraphy evaluation is a complex psychological process, which is in the opposite direction to calligraphy creation. Calligraphy creation is the collection of paintings to form words. Composed of words, thus showing the spiritual realm of the work; The first visual impression of calligraphy evaluation is often the spirit and charm of the book. Re-examine its composition, analyze its writing intention of using a pen and a book, and connect it with various things in life, the author's creative environment and ideological activities, so as to understand the beauty of the work. Therefore, the process of calligraphy evaluation is the process of "re-creation" of beauty by viewers.
You can find some knowledge about the art of calligraphy online.