Types of Modern Calligraphy in China and Others
Author: Fu Jingsheng Source: Art Observation
"Modern calligraphy" is a concept of historical category, and it is a general term for many trendy calligraphy schools that broke through the traditional calligraphy style after 1985. Modern calligraphy is complex in thought and expression, but they still have the same characteristics, that is, the vanguard of borderless creation and the simplicity of stimulating intuition. Its style can be roughly divided into the following types:
1. China's poetic style. This kind of works still express the author's thoughts, feelings and aesthetic interests through Chinese characters, existing poems, articles and sentences. However, the author abandoned the strict statutes and norms of traditional calligraphy and was no longer bound by the ethical concepts and traditional aesthetic orientation contained in traditional calligraphy. Instead, we deliberately pursue the strengthening of modeling posture, the exaggeration of points and strokes, the deformation of structure, and the enlargement of specific parts in the sense of visual psychodynamics, so that people will be excited or frightened at the sight of the works and their souls will tremble. Representative works include outstanding Walking on the Tiger's Tail, Le, Wang Naizhuang's Walking on the Shore, Happy Years, and Ma's Citation without Hair.
2. Non-China freehand brushwork style. This kind of works inherits the brushwork of traditional calligraphy and pays attention to the aesthetic connotation of stippling lines, such as tendons, bones, blood, flesh, spirit and qi. It must be the product of profound technical foundation and cultivated talent and style. Although this kind of works abandons the media relying on Chinese characters, they still attach importance to the arrangement, combination and composition of lines, and should have the aesthetic feeling similar to China Chinese characters and China calligraphy. Representative works include Tian, Li Dan by Xing Shizhen, and Dreams in the Horizon by Bu Lieping. This kind of work is a pure visual image expression without the interference of text function, and the image of the work is a "heavenly book" created by its author. This calligraphy style, because it has completely entered the pure abstract expression, is convenient to give the ink image magical meaning and extraordinary imagination, thus having a strong character of the times.
3. Passionate venting. The author of this style makes pen and ink produce picturesque effect on paper by spraying, sprinkling, splashing, sweeping, brushing, wiping and waving. The writing nature of traditional calligraphy quietly retreats in this kind of works, and their works present aesthetic characteristics similar to expressionism or fauvism painting. If this kind of work is still calligraphy, it is because its author put it in the time and space of calligraphy appreciation as a calligrapher. Representative works include Shao Yan's Sea, Liu Tianyu's Fission of Points and Zhang Qiang's Maneuvering Series. Such works are most suitable for expressing self-emotion and reflecting the author's personality and talent.
4. The concept of rationality constitutes the style. The rigid stylized calligraphy castrates the aesthetic feeling, which is mainly due to the heavy burden of ethical concepts. However, any art form must ultimately have profound rational support. In the ecological balance of the development of modern law, it is indispensable to study the origin of calligraphy itself beyond the meaning and reference of words. That is to discuss the metaphysical "existence" of calligraphy. In this sense, Qiu Zhenzhong's textbook series and Lodge's calligraphy can be regarded as an in-depth investigation of the metalanguage of calligraphy text and an explanation of its essential characteristics. We call such calligraphy works rational composition calligraphy. Its formal feature is that the cold abstraction contains tenacious and exuberant life interest.
5. Calligraphy style with installation and performance art as the medium. Wang Nanming of Shanghai was the first person to participate in calligraphy activities through installation art. He installed the word balls showing calligraphy and handwriting in the space of the club net rack, or in the space composed of ready-made objects that he thought could create a certain atmosphere. At the same time, he also reported his artistic views through audio-visual and other text dissemination methods, aiming to make calligraphy, which is transforming into modernity, gradually approach the world avant-garde trend of thought. It was Zhang Qiang of Shandong Art Institute who intervened in the practice of modern calligraphy in the form of performance art. His artistic activity was named "A/B trace model" and his "model" was introduced by many art publications at home and abroad. At present, people in the circle generally believe that no matter how people evaluate Zhang Qiang's "trace model", there is no doubt that the materialized image of this "model" is extremely emotional and visual aesthetic.
In the long diachronic development, the style of traditional calligraphy has gradually formed some stereotyped performance States. This stereotyped form of expression is often formed by a genius after a certain calligraphy style has developed to a certain stage and accumulated certain performance experience and materialized results. Therefore, once this type of expression is finalized, it will become a specimen mode of self-practice that people can't surpass in art form and meteorology. However, whether you admit it or not, since 1840, after a series of cultural changes, such as the Opium War and the Revolution of 1911, the historical soil of China's classical culture no longer exists, especially the westernization of modern education and vernacular culture, which led to the loss of China's ancient cultural thoughts in deep cultural psychology. Therefore, as far as calligraphy aesthetics is concerned, we know nothing about what calligraphy is in the minds of ancient people in China. That is to say, although the ancient calligraphy art in China has made brilliant achievements, it has lost the cultural soil that forms today's characteristics. Today, people's aesthetic concepts are far from those of the ancients. Therefore, it is a historical necessity to rebuild the tradition of calligraphy culture instead of returning to it.
In a word, if today's China people's life style is constructed in the backwash criticism of the ancient China people's life style, then it must come from the backwash and criticism of culture. Therefore, the so-called "modern calligraphy" can be regarded as an intentional construction activity based on cultural criticism carried out by modern people in a self-made way in a specific time and space.
At this point, we want to say that it is also a historical necessity for some artists in modern calligraphy to turn to today's "postmodernism" trend of thought. Even we can say that "postmodern calligraphy" is still modern calligraphy.
Judging from the landscape of "Modern Calligraphy in China", it is an indisputable fact that "Postmodernism" has penetrated into the field of modern calligraphy. Although there is no unified definition of the concept of "postmodernism" at present, one thing is clear: modernism still follows the materials stipulated or endowed by the inherent art category in its tools and materials. For example, Pollock, no matter how he "vented", used canvas, brush, pigment, balanced interpretation, oil painting and other technical means, no different from Cezanne, while "postmodernism" was dismissed. In short, as far as visualization is concerned, "postmodernism" art is multimedia art. In the above sense, "postmodernism" has three artistic functions that cannot be ignored in contemporary China, namely: (1) backwashing western centralism; (2) Resist the erosion of rigid ideas in ancient clay; (3) Establish contemporary artistic discourse in a meaningful way. The relationship among them is a progressive logical relationship. Their results are completely different from those of poking fun at western texts and classical culture, but the intuitive schema theory that people experience when they ask questions about the skin of the times.
Finally, we want to say:
The contemporary field of "modern calligraphy" is by no means a situation in which a certain calligraphy style dominates the world. At present, as a whole, modern book circles can be divided into the following schools in the sense of cross-cultural research and linguistic turn: new style of writing, neoclassicism, new childlike freehand brushwork, stream of consciousness, academic school, ancient school, Xinmin school, new literati calligraphy school, non-Chinese character collection school, structuralism, popism and "postmodernism".
This shows that the current book world is in a mode in which pluralistic theory and practice blend and collide with each other. It shows that the different choices of calligraphy styles determine the different postures of calligraphers in the calligraphy world.
In the sense mentioned above, what we miss is that only by staying in the space-time field of contemporary great culture and great calligraphy and being willing to act as a cultural pioneer can we finally produce a calligrapher who is selected by the times and meets the needs of the times. Only in this way can we finally complete the mission entrusted to us by history to solve the collision and blending of ancient and modern Chinese and foreign cultures in the past century. Only in this way can the reconstruction of contemporary China culture based on China cultural tradition be completed.
Originally published in Art Watch No.6, 1998.
If you feel abstract, look at the pictures here:
/me? tn = baiduimage & ampct=20 1326592。 lm=- 1。 cl = 2 & ampD6 % B4 % FA % CA % E9 % B7 % A8 & amp； t=3