Feel the beauty of variant characters

People who like calligraphy know variant forms. Different from traditional Chinese characters, variant Chinese characters are different ways to write Chinese characters. Now books are printed, and the writing of each Chinese character is unified. Simplified Chinese is used in Chinese mainland and traditional Chinese is used in Taiwan Province Province. However, in ancient times, people wrote by hand, and not everyone wrote the same strokes, so the same words were written in different ways. This is the variant.

In this article, I will not discuss the origin of variant forms here, nor analyze the principles of variant forms, which are left to experts for textual research. I mainly want to talk about my feelings and immature ideas about variant characters.

We are writing not for practicality, but for beauty. Therefore, the writing method mostly uses traditional Chinese characters. Because traditional Chinese characters have more strokes than simplified Chinese characters, they look good when written. However, I find variant characters more attractive. In a calligraphy, if several variants are used properly, it will add a lot of interest.

Chinese characters are hieroglyphics, and the printed fonts are too regular. Therefore, if calligraphy is written exactly like printmaking, it will be very dull. Like the word "Ning" in Ningbo, the variant is "Ning". This painting of Jin Yong's calligraphy is "Jingyuan", and the word "Ning" uses the variant "Ning".

Taiwan Province has a very popular star named Zhang Junning. I didn't know the word "Ning" just now, but later I learned that it is a variant of Ning. There is also a craft artist named Pang Xunqin, who has often seen this name before and is very strange to the word "Qin". It turns out that "Qin" is a variant of Qin. I found that most of the variant characters are better than the original characters. For example, the variant of grass is "fu" and the variant of fresh is "fresh", which is very vivid. For example, the variant of Jane is Xun, the remaining variant is Jian, and the variant of Mei is Yun. Some words have more than one variant but many. There are many variants of words like "suo", "Cai", "Xiu", "Lao" and "Liu".

Some words and variants are interchanges of two radicals, such as "autumn", "duo", "shore" and "male". If it is printed, the font should be uniform, otherwise it is not easy to read, but if it is handwritten, the variant characters will improve the artistic value of this manuscript.

Writing variants is not to show how educated you are. Like Kong Yiji in Lu Xun's novels, he likes to show off his knowledge and tell people how many ways to write fennel. People will laugh at a man who doesn't even have enough to eat. But times have changed. Nowadays, with the revival of traditional culture, more and more people like calligraphy and painting. These variants even contain the clues of China culture, which is worth exploring and pursuing.