What is the definition of calligraphy?

Calligraphy also means "writing" in classical Chinese, so the original meaning of calligraphy is the writing method. Later, "writing" was used as a method of writing, while "calligraphy" was extended to the art of writing.

In modern times, there are two types of calligraphy: hard pen calligraphy and soft pen calligraphy.

Hard-pen calligraphy of Chinese characters is relatively simple, which refers to the art of writing with pens with hard tips such as pens and carbon pens. It pays attention to structure and fluency, and has not changed much.

Soft brush calligraphy refers to China's traditional calligraphy, that is, the art of writing with a brush. It focuses on combining the characteristics and significance of words with aesthetic brushwork, structure and composition. It is commonly found in five types: regular script, seal script, official script, running script and cursive script. Each type of "book" has its own famous "style", such as Yan and Liu in regular script. Seal script usually refers to the small seal script used by Qin Shihuang when he unified the characters, and other seal scripts are collectively called big seal script. In fact, there are different scripts, such as the famous Tadpole script and Jiugong script.