Respecting the law is the consistent position of the Tang Dynasty. Taking poetry as an example, disciplined poetry was formed and perfected in the Tang Dynasty with strict rules. In the early Tang Dynasty, a peak of legalist thought appeared in the history of China's calligraphy. Ou Yangxun, Yu Shinan, Chu Suiliang and Xue Ji, four court officials, are the representatives of calligraphy creation in the early Tang Dynasty. The main reason is the advocacy of Emperor Taizong. Judging from the profound structure of China's traditional culture, the four masters in the early Tang Dynasty provided the style of "gentlemen" and the Confucian ethical thought of being loyal to the monarch wholeheartedly, which can be confirmed by Emperor Taizong's evaluation of Yu Shinan's five wonders: "First, virtue, second, loyalty, third, erudition, fourth, diction and fifth." From this, we can clearly see that Emperor Taizong established a dependent personality that can be imitated by literati and a tool to serve imperial politics.
Under this understanding, it is not difficult to understand that Tang Kai's pen is horizontal and vertical, round and vigorous, dignified and steady, elegant and beautiful.
The political enlightenment and diversified development of culture in the prosperous Tang Dynasty not only created profound and dignified regular script, but also inspired dripping and carefree cursive script, represented by Zhang Xu and Huai Su. Unlike regular script writers, Huai Su is a monk. Although Zhang Xu has a long history as an official, he has no right to be an official, which makes them less bound by politics. Together with Li Bai's poems, it constructed the aesthetic characteristics of romanticism in the prosperous Tang Dynasty.
I think the significance of this phenomenon in the history of calligraphy is that it suggests that a cultural phenomenon must have its political background and cultural characteristics, and it is meaningless to study a cultural phenomenon alone without the political background and cultural characteristics of the times. (Laughter)
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