The dazzling highlight of Hu Gongshi’s life of more than eighty years was his indissoluble bond with calligraphy, the artistic treasure of the Chinese nation, and he worked hard to promote and develop this cultural tradition. , made unremitting efforts, achieved brilliant achievements, and left a glorious page in the history of Chinese calligraphy.
Since his youth, while actively assisting Mr. Yu Youren in the research and editing of standard cursive script, he has directly studied under the master, listened to the teachings in person, read the Dharma books extensively, and worked diligently day and night. It lasted for thirteen years. As a result, his academic attainment greatly increased, his calligraphy skills improved, and he was deeply impressed by the charm of Mr. Yu's pen and ink, and he was extremely rich in "Yu calligraphy" methods.
In the practice of calligraphy art, Hu Gongshi is famous for his cursive calligraphy, and is especially good at cursive calligraphy. The main characteristics of his cursive writing are: strict rules, vigorous and graceful combinations, thick texture and free and easy at the bottom of the wrist. It is fluid and beautiful in the vigorous and concise, and has the realm of "an iron horse in the autumn wind blocking the north, apricot blossoms in the spring rain in the south". After the age of sixty, cursive writing becomes more sophisticated and smooth, combining both French and rhyme. In addition to participating in major national and international exhibitions, his works have also been held in personal calligraphy art exhibitions and Chinese and foreign cursive calligraphy exhibitions in Yinchuan, Lanzhou, Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou and other places. In his later years, together with his junior brothers Li Putong from Taiwan and Tomoyo Kanazawa from Japan, he held a joint exhibition of Mr. Yu Youren's calligraphy and a joint exhibition of standard cursive calligraphy and Japanese calligraphy in Beijing, Nanjing, Hangzhou and other places. His calligraphy has always been valued by collectors and institutions at home and abroad. Many works are collected by institutions such as Zhongnanhai, the Great Hall of the People, Chairman Mao Memorial Hall, the National Art Museum of China, the Museum of Chinese History, the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, and calligraphy and painting enthusiasts at home and abroad. It has far-reaching influence and is well received.
Hu Gongshi’s research on cursive calligraphy is even more impressive and fruitful. As early as the early 1930s, under the leadership of Mr. Yu Youren, he was a close friend of Liu Yantao. He assisted Mr. Yu in collecting extensively the manuscripts and treatises of cursive calligraphers of past dynasties, and devoted himself to studying them to achieve "easy to understand, easy to write, accurate, and accurate". Based on the principle of "beautiful", we sorted out and compared various cursive scripts, selected standard cursive characters, gave shape to the irregular cursive script, established representative symbols of cursive script, summarized the rules of cursive script, edited and published the book "Standard Cursive Script". It opened up a bright road for the development of cursive calligraphy art and made an epoch-making contribution to the history of Chinese writing.
Over the past seventy years, the advent of "Standard Cursive Script" has had a profound impact on the development of calligraphy art. It is famous in China and has spread to many countries in Japan, Southeast Asia, Europe and the United States. In 1959, in order to study the art of cursive calligraphy, Chairman Mao Zedong wrote to his secretary Tian Jiaying, requesting that all kinds of cursive calligraphy copybooks be cleared out to him, "including several rubbings (by Wang Xizhi and others), Yu Youren's Thousand-Character Essay and Cao Jue Ge". When the chairman was talking about learning calligraphy with his daughter Li Na, he particularly praised Yu Youren's cursive script, saying that he had done a very meaningful thing in compiling the "Standard Cursive Script". The calligraphy was good and strong. If you want to learn cursive writing, you must learn "Standard Cursive Script", which can be used as an introduction to cursive writing. The cursive parts of various dictionaries compiled in Japan use standard cursive script, and the number of people learning standard cursive script in Japan is increasing day by day. In Chinese bookstores in cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco in the United States, "Standard Cursive Script" is sold out as soon as it arrives, and demand often exceeds supply.
Time flies and people undergo vicissitudes of life. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, although Hu Gongshi, Mr. Yu Youren and his colleagues who were engaged in the standard cursive writing industry were separated on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, his nostalgia for him grew day by day, and he was even more passionate about the standard cursive writing cause. In order to inherit and develop the standard cursive script career pioneered by Mr. Yu Youren, Hu Gongshi bravely took on the important task of organizing, creating, supplementing and promoting cursive script. Even during the turbulent years of the "Cultural Revolution", when he was constantly criticized and "censored", he still concentrated on the research of standard cursive script, inherited the unfinished work of his predecessors, and worked hard to "open a new path for future cursive script" according to Mr. Yu's instructions.
In June 1984, with the cordial care and strong support of the United Front Work Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, Hu Gongshi and Qu Wu, the former vice chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, re-founded the "Chinese Standard Cursive Script Society". And concurrently serves as president.
He actively organized and mobilized colleagues who were interested in the cause of standard cursive writing, engaged in the research and promotion of standard cursive writing, strengthened academic exchanges with Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Thailand, the United States, France and other countries, as well as Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao, and created a A new frontier for standard cursive writing. At the same time, Mr. Hu Gongshi compiled and compiled the "Standard Cursive Script Vocabulary" based on Mr. Yu Youren's "Standard Cursive Script" (Thousand-Character Text) based on his years of research, which was officially published on the twentieth anniversary of Mr. Yu's death.
"Chinese Vocabulary" contains more than 6,000 commonly used Chinese characters, which greatly enriches the content of the "Thousand-Character Classic" and basically meets the needs of daily use of Chinese characters. In terms of symbols, not only the representative symbols were supplemented and improved (i.e., the number of radicals increased from the original 74 to 91, and the number of radicals increased from the original 339 to 385), but separate symbols were proposed for the first time to standardize and standardize the cursive writing of Chinese characters. It is more complete and basically covers all commonly used Chinese characters. This enables the art of cursive calligraphy to correct chaos, eliminate complexity and simplify it, cut difficulties into easy ones, and become unified. It makes cursive script from virtual to practical, without violating the principle of calligraphy beauty, making it more practical and easy to popularize, and has made a great contribution to the inheritance and development of standard cursive script.
In order to promote the art of standard cursive script and accelerate the development of standard cursive script, at the end of 1994, Hu Gongshi personally invited Mr. Yu Youren's colleagues at home and abroad, including Wan Renyuan, Li Putong, Kanazawa Chiqing, etc. to edit and publish " "Mr. Yu Youren's Notes". In 1995, he personally wrote and published "Hu Gongshi's Standard Cursive Script Thousand-Character Essay". During his tenure as president, he also successively organized the World Chinese Cursive Calligraphy Exhibition, the Calligraphy Exhibition of Mr. Yu Youren's Fellows, and the Standard Cursive Chinese and Japanese Joint Exhibition. (Source: Yandu District CPPCC Culture and History Committee)