Striving for novelty means pursuing novelty and being different.
The general meaning of Shangqi is to pursue novelty and be different. In the middle and late Ming Dynasty, the more unconventional and unconventional a cultural person was, the easier it was for him to be encouraged and appreciated, and he could even do something shocking. As long as you were new and unique enough, society was still very tolerant of culture. The most obvious example is reflected in the calligraphy of that time.
Dong Qichang, a great calligrapher during the Wanli period, is the spokesperson of "Shangqi" calligraphy. A very important concept in his calligraphy is "raw". The opposite of "raw" is "ripened". It means imitating what the predecessors did. This is the previous concept of traditional calligraphy. Calligraphy must be copied and must follow a set of preset formats.
So, people used to think that good calligraphy was written very much like the ancients. Dong Qichangsheng's concept subverts this tradition. He emphasizes that calligraphy must have its own creativity. Calligraphy should not be limited to copying, but should become a tool to express one's inner self. Copying is a basic skill, and of course it is very important, but after you have mastered it, you should get back to it.
This is to consciously widen the gap with the ancients. Dong Qichang's idea changed the understanding of the word "lin" in "copying" in the history of calligraphy. Copying is no longer based on the "image" of "lin", but hopes to surpass the predecessors in copying. This is very important to classic calligraphy. status had a great impact.
The biography of Dong Shangqi
Dong Qichang was born in Dongjiahui, Shanghai County, Songjiang Prefecture, South Zhili. Born in the thirty-fourth year of Jiajing. When Dong Qichang was 17 years old, he took the Songjiang Prefecture Examination. At that time, he wrote a very proud eight-legged essay and thought he was sure to win the first prize. Unexpectedly, when the results were released, he actually fell behind his nephew Dong Yuanzheng. The reason was that the Songjiang magistrate Zhong Zhenji felt that his handwriting on the test paper was poor. Although his article was good, he could only be ranked second.
This incident deeply stimulated Dong Qichang, and from then on he devoted himself to learning calligraphy. Taking Yan Zhenqing's Duobao Pagoda Tie from the Tang Dynasty as a model, he later studied the Wei and Jin Dynasties and copied the Dharma Tie from Zhong Yao and Wang Xizhi. After more than ten years of hard work, Dong Qichang's calligraphy has made great progress, and he has gradually become familiar with landscape painting.