On the image beauty and abstract beauty of Chinese character configuration
Calligraphy is a plastic art that uses Chinese characters as its material. Mr. Jin Kaicheng regards Chinese characters as the first "hardware" of the art of calligraphy. In addition to providing the calligrapher with the content of sentences, the more important thing is that its own configuration is a beautiful shape, which is the beauty of calligraphy. key to existence.
About the pictographic beauty of Chinese character configuration
There is a difference between the pictographic beauty of Chinese character configuration and the abstract beauty of Chinese character configuration. The former refers to the direct beauty of Chinese character configuration at the beginning of creation. The image formed by tracing the objects in the objective world and consistent with the meaning of the words has beauty, but it is only at a basic level; and the latter is the essence of the beauty of Chinese characters.
Chinese characters are an autonomous writing. At the beginning of writing, they were all "character elements" of some zodiac pictograms (there may also be some dots and lines used to refer to things). In the evolution of history and the development of characters, these "form elements" became the "reasons for character creation" and continued to form new characters as components and characters. These "morphological elements" and "character creation reasons" are also constantly developing into characters, becoming "basically non-pictographic" components, but they originally came from images and are the gene for the image beauty of Chinese characters. The "pictographic" theory, the "character painting" theory and the "picture writing" theory of the origin of characters fully affirm the pictographic beauty of Chinese characters.
The more primitive the characters, the more pictographic they should be. Calligraphy and painting have the same origin. In the early days of Chinese characters, picture-like characters existed. Tang Lan believes that the original text only has graphics, and various techniques are used to express more complex meanings from the graphics of various objects. ① Zhou Youguang said: "Text originated from pictures. Primitive pictures developed in two directions. On the one hand, they became pictorial art, and on the other hand, they became writing techniques. Primitive text materials can be divided into carved symbols, rock paintings, calligraphy paintings and picture calligraphy."
② Therefore, iconicity is an important feature of Chinese character configuration, as Mr. Liu Gangji said: “When writing Chinese character symbols, calligraphers have given these symbols an image quality that can arouse people’s aesthetic feeling. All the beauty in the world can be perceived with images, and there is no beauty that can be perceived without images.”
③However, this kind of image that simulates objects is the basis of the beauty of Chinese character configuration. The beauty of iconography is not the highest beauty of Chinese character configuration. Some calligraphers strive to reflect this image in their works, writing Chinese characters in their works as close as possible to the objective objects they express. Facts have proved that the overall aesthetic feeling of such a book is not high. The beauty of the configuration of Chinese characters is the beauty of abstract images. This beauty reflects the situation, form or situation of the image of things, and is the sublimation of the image.
The abstract beauty of Chinese character configurations
Describing objective objects was the main method used by ancestors when they first created characters. When characters are written, they present images of some things, which is different from painting. What a difference. However, when we conduct archaeological research, we do not see so many vivid and picturesque images, but more abstract and distinctive ideograms. This is mainly determined by the function of characters. It mainly expresses meanings and sounds. It is enough for everyone to be familiar with it. Of course, the more concise and eye-catching its shape is, the better. This is the reason why the configuration of Chinese characters is expressed as an abstract image. The basis of beauty. In this regard, most scholars believe that Chinese characters have been abstract in nature since their origin. Even though some were pictographic, they quickly became abstract later on. Mr. Qian Mu believes that at first, Chinese writing was "pictographic", but it soon moved into the scope of "imagery" and "imagery". ④
However, the abstract form of Chinese characters is already more vivid and beautiful than the concrete form of pictograms mentioned above. As Zong Baihua pointed out: "Chinese characters are pictographic. They have the basis of pictograms, and this is artistic. Originally they were pictographic, but later Chinese characters gradually became more and more abstract... However, deep down, they still retain This spirit.”⑤This is just one aspect of the abstract image beauty of Chinese characters. Its more profound significance is that the abstract image beauty of Chinese character configuration is a kind of life image, the beauty of force image, and the essential beauty of Chinese character configuration. Understanding form from the perspective of force-image is the essence of human perception.