Calligraphy works:
What is an ugly book?
In fact, there is no unified concept of ugly books, and there is no such thing as ugly books in ancient times. It's a word made by netizens themselves, which is ugly-looking calligraphy.
This is very interesting. There is no fixed standard for being ugly. The same calligraphy, some people look ugly, and some people may look beautiful.
People who don't know calligraphy look beautiful, while those who know calligraphy feel ugly. How to define this? Obviously, this concept is not very rigorous, so there is a great controversy about ugly books.
Ugly books are the driving force behind the development of calligraphy.
The "official reform" in the history of calligraphy made seal script careless, turning rounded corners into squares and arcs into straight strokes. How ugly is this in the eyes of orthodox seal writers? Almost at the same time, there was "Cao Zhang", which was nonsense in the eyes of calligraphers at that time.
It is estimated that when they look at those people writing about Cao Zhang, they look at the man with the needle ink. The cursive script of official script was ignored for many years, until Zhao Mengfu added regular script and official script brushwork to seal script in the late Song and early Yuan Dynasty.
Today, this is an artistic breakthrough. At that time, people may not accept it all. Prior to this, the official script style occupied the mainstream of seal script aesthetics for a long time.