My Take on Appreciating Chinese Calligraphy (Part I) 我欣賞中國書法意見（第一部分）

Warning:  I am not a professional scholar on the subject of Chinese calligraphy.  I am merely an amateur connoisseur of Chinese calligraphy  Corrections and constructive criticism are welcome.

聲明：  我不是中國書法專家。我只是個中國書法業餘愛好者。歡迎各位的批評和指教。

A master calligrapher makes his craft look effortless.  It takes only 5-10 minutes to write 10 to 100 characters, but masterpieces are treasured and save for millennia.

書法工藝外觀看來不費絲毫力氣。寫出幾十百字只要幾分鐘，但被視為佳作就能珍藏幾千年。

I have tried a few times writing calligraphy, and it requires hand and mind to flow as one.  I don't say this in a artsy or flowery sense, any doubts or  wanderings of the mind literally translates to the hands.  The slightest twitch can ruin a masterpiece.

我自己只試過毛筆幾次而已。書法需要手於心靈相通。我說的不是藝術氣息或華麗感，而是心裡的一絲懷疑就會影響到手的動作。手的細微抖動能毀掉傑作。

I'm not going to start the discussion of Chinese calligraphy in chronological order with oracle bones from the Shang Dynasty.  I will start with the most familiar.

首先，我不按時間順序從商朝甲骨文談起書法的字體演變。我先講各位比較熟悉的。

The most commonly used script that's still used in practice today is called "Kaishu"（楷書）.  Calligraphy taught in the Far East teaches Kaishu first in standard public education.  While American schools used #2 carbon pencils to write between comically large lines, Chinese students jump into the deep end of the pool and use the same tools as calligraphy masters.  The four basic tools are called "The Four Treasures of the Study Room" (書房四寶), they include the paper, paperweight, brush, and ink.  Albeit, beginners get to use grid paper like this:

現在最常用的字體是楷書。  東亞地區教書法先用楷書做標準字體。而美國用二號鉛筆碳寫字在滑稽的大線裡面，中國學生跳進池深側而用書法大師的工具。  基本工具稱為“書房四寶”，  它們包括筆，墨，紙， 硯。  儘管，學徒用九宮格紙：

(Source)

Once a calligrapher starts, everything is about copying previous masters.  But how can copying be a creative form of art?  Without originality in calligraphy, is it even an art form authentic to the expression of the creator?

要成為書法家都從擬摹以前的名家著手。但抄寫如何稱為一種藝術？  書法沒有原創的話， 這種藝術形式真實傳達創作者的意念？

I respond with the master mimicker, Zhang Daqian 1899 - 1983 (張大千)：

我舉模仿大師，張大千1899 - 1983：

(Source. I hope I age as gracefully as him when I'm old)

Zhang Daqian was known mostly for his Chinese painting, but the brush techniques in painting derive from writing characters.  Although his works are fairly contemporary to the time scale of Chinese history, he was able to re-discover painting techniques lost for 1300 years when he studied the Dunhuang caves.  Even today, some paintings that were originally thought to date from the Tang may have been Zhang Daqian's works.  That's like someone during the Great Depression painting Da Vinci fooling professional historians today!  Except the forgeries of Zhang Daqian were older than Da Vinci by another 500 years!  It was his ability to mimic that helped rediscover the techniques of ancient painting.

張大千的作品多為中國繪畫，但繪畫技術啟發自書法。雖然他的作品表現了當代中國歷史的時間尺度，但當他研究敦煌石窟時期，  他重新發現失落了1300年的粉刷技術。即使在現在，有些繪畫原先以為可上溯唐朝，事實上卻可能是張大千的作品。這就像大蕭條時期的達文西的繪畫愚弄了今日的專業歷史學家！  但張大千的贗品比達文西通過年長另外500 年！  他的模仿能力幫助世人重新發現古代繪畫的技巧。

(Even the color pigments Zhang used were authentic to the Tang Dynasty!  The colors dude, the colors!)

(Source.  East and West meet! Starting from left to right:  Pablo Picasso, Zhang Daqian, Xu Wenbo (Zhang Daqian's 4th wife))

The act of copying also preserves calligraphy and it's influence on people over time.  Imagine if there was a secret original copy of Beowulf was saved, and every major literary and historical figure decided to attach an their own commentary after reading appreciating the masterpiece.  Let's say Chaucer, King John, Shakespeare, King Edward II, Keats, Aquinas, Dickens, and George Washington all wrote something.  English majors would build a cathedral and have a nerdgasm of excitement, worshiping this document.  Such a document exists in the Chinese literary culture called "Sunny after Snow"  by Wang Xizhi (303 AD to 361 AD).

複製的行為還保留了書法及其對人們長期的影響。試想一下，如果有貝奧武甫的一個秘密的原件被保存，和每一個主要的文學和歷史人物決定閱讀欣賞的佳作後附加一個自己的評論。比方說，喬叟，約翰國王，莎士比亞，英國國王愛德華二世，濟慈，阿奎那，狄更斯和喬治華盛頓都寫了些什麼。英語專業的學生將建立一個大教堂和有興奮地崇拜這個文件。中國文學文化的存在一份名為 “快雪時晴帖”的書札王羲之（公元303至公元361 ）。

The entire scroll is much longer.  Here's the full version.  The right side with the blackened paper is Wang Xizhi's original calligraphy. It's only four lines of poetry, 28 characters.  So what does Wang Xizhi have to do with Chinese calligraphy?  Wait for part II!

整個捲軸更長。下面是完整版本。右側的熏黑紙是王羲之的書法原創。它只有四行詩， 28個字符。那麼，王羲之與中國書法有什麼關係呢？等待第二部分！

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隨意留言給未來的博客主題的請求。

Feeling Words

I should be in my pajamas watching the newest episode of Pokémon with my sister this Saturday morning. Instead, I’m dressed up in a dress shirt with hard leather shoes, nervously trying not to forget lines of Chinese poetry.

Remember to point to the sky when you say “sparrow”… Make sure “not” is softer, “return” is louder…

While every other kid in my neighborhood gets to go home in the afternoon after a hard day of elementary school, I have another 3 hours of Chinese school every weekday.

My Chinese teacher is a remnant of the old Taiwanese system of education. Before I even learned my own name in Chinese, I was forced to have perfect pronunciation. As a former radio broadcaster in Taiwan, my Chinese teacher drilled us to be pitch perfect.

“Third tone! Third tone! Your mother isn’t a horse!”

“Curl your tongue!”

“Squeeze your lips like a dead fish!”

Every year, Chinese schools all over southern California converted a local high school into a poetry recital gauntlet. Children in preppy, itchy clothing would huddle around pushy teachers and parents, eking out a final practice run before the judging began. Parents used to be allowed to witness the competition, but some overachieving parents decided to mouth lines to their children as they were being judged, which by competition and ethical standards was cheating. As a new rule, every child was forced to perform in front of the judges, alone with other competition students.

All of us were stone-faced, nervous in our “adorable” outfits. Like sheep heading towards the slaughter, one by one we would recite the same three poems to the judges. Each time someone's voice cracked or when someone mispronounced a word, the judges would frantically scribble on their score sheet. What would always put me on edge was when someone completely forgot their lines and burst into tears. Along with losing the chance of winning, their morale was crushed, all at the age of nine.

What was worse was watching the people who did “well.” Before this person uttered a single word, you could already sense the stench of cockiness. In the kitschiest way possible, the over-inflection in each syllable was the product of each nit-picky detail corrected by a tiger parent or teacher. At every high shriek, most students who watched couldn’t help but giggle at the ridiculous circus act.

As a 9-year-old, I had no idea what any of this poetry meant. Sure, I knew most of the nouns, but when encountering lines like “why do our days leave and not return?” my premature mind thought, “Well there’s no time machine, stupid!”

This activity had nothing to do with appreciating poetry. Being surrounded by pushy parents who wanted to put their children in a trophy case, there was a sense of pride knowing that your child was better than another. A gold plastic cup was concrete evidence of that fact.

Poetry was imprinted into my mind as being pretentious and a complete waste of time. Poetry was another assignment, something that had to follow arbitrary irrational “standards.” The whole process was mechanical, devoid of any love for the words we spoke. Words had no meaning for me.

Until I went to college.

I signed up for Classical Chinese only because I mixed 110 with 101 when I applied. Classical Chinese is the ancient literary style of written Chinese, which is quite different from modern Chinese. Slowly and painstakingly, each word was carefully analyzed, picked to the last detail. All the rules of Chinese I knew were thrown out the window. Use some damn possessive pronouns Confucius!

One day, our class had just finished translating “The Orchid Pavilion.” It’s pretty much about a bunch of drunk emo poets who take shots. As they continue to write poetry, they begin to ponder about the nature of their existence. Compared to the universe, their moment of happiness was only a fleeting moment compared to the grand expanse of the universe.

For the longest time, I thought words served only to communicate information. Anything beyond that context was just extraneous, flowery language only used on standardized tests.
The moment I bit into that sweet orange or that moment poets drank blissfully into the night – words froze those moments in time. Words had the power to immortalize a thought.

Our classical Chinese professor told us to meet in the East Asian Library. As I trudged through the rain, my socks were soaked all the way through. I entered the dimly lit library in the art seminar room. Inside, warm light bathed the center table. Numerous ancient copies of the “Orchid Pavilion” were splayed naked on the table.

“Feel free to touch history,” my professor said.

As I carefully grazed my fingers over the yellowing paper and pine soot brush strokes, a chill unrelated to my cold feet struck me.

Through the tumultuous ebb and flow of history, a world that seemed so alien and remote was still relatable. That seemingly insignificant moment when these poets realized the fleeting temporal nature of reality would rot their flesh was imprinted here, their thoughts are still alive. When I close my eyes and smell the fermented paper, they were alive in my mind.

The last line of the text quotes,

後之覽者亦將有感於斯文
“May future generations who glance here feel these words.”

I finally felt words.

The Chinese Art Book: Music in Visual Art

Marquis Yi Bell Set, 433 BC

Dancing Figure and Musician, 2nd Century BC

Sound are longitudinal waves that propagate through air.  For those who are fortunate enough to have a sense of hearing and sight, we instinctively correlate the size and weight of an object to its sound.  We can feel the vibrations of the instrument as it moves through our bodies.

Some music in Chinese history was used for ritual and ornate state ceremony.  In this case, the bells in the picture above are black, heavy looking, and regular it its pattern and adornments.  Everything about this piece is deliberate and controlled.  They don't appear to be household objects, too heavy to be practical.  They appear to serve a grand purpose.  The size of the bells imply the sound carries over a large distance.  The picture above isn't from The Chinese Art Book, but there are also long wooden rods used to strike the bell.

The figures on the bottom are curvaceous and asymmetric, suggesting imbalance and movement.  I will assume for now that the figures are female.  The dance figure on the left has these long sleeves that accentuate her arms.  The movements are meant to take space with the purpose of attracting attention.  The figure looks as if she's mourning over a tomb, but it's a 25-stringed instrument that sits on the ground.  The position of her heads shows her direction of focus, and the hands are poised, ready to use the fine motor skills of her fingers to pluck complex chords and melodies.

The instrumentalists in the following video look dorky, but this is an accurate historical recreation of music from the Warring States period.  Ancient music sheets survived along with someone having the foresight to label each bell with its respective note.  The dance sequence is based on small models and historical painting:

I'm not sure what to make of these pieces.  I can only imagine myself an emperor of my court.  As all of my ministers are wining and dining in front of me, I am sitting on my throne, listening with my eyes closed as I consider the present moment of my empire.  I'm hoping no one assassinates me.

The Chinese Art Book: Text and Permenance

Diamond Sutra 868AD  

Stamping on Water, Song Dong, 1996

Note: The man is holding a seal carved with  "水," the character for water.

The Diamond Sutra is the earliest example of printed text that exists today.  This piece depicts a monk kneeling and prostrating himself in the front of the Buddha and enlightened deities.  The power of the written word derives from it's ability to create ideas that surpasses an individual's imagination.
Yet the written word on text is immobile.  It needs the human agent to influence action.

I find it ironic that the earliest published book is a Buddhist text because Buddhism preaches suffering from the attachment to identity.  The very nature of text is to identify and categorize.  Ideas of human beings are based on how humans relate the outside world to our own perceptions.  Buddhism claims perception in itself is a form of illusion, impermanent as nature erodes and constantly shifts identity.

When Song Dong attempts to imprint a human label onto nature, the label has no permanence.  The water has no ability to self identify, or hold onto such a label.  The liquid simply returns to it's original state and continues to flow.  Man cannot force nature to accept a label.

Song Dong's piece also shows how text relates to the flow of time.  Text will always be about recorded thoughts from the past.  Ink holds and maintains ideas when it attaches to paper, but the the of the present moment becomes the past.  The present in infinitesimally fleeting.  Nature needs no sense of self identity and continuously changes.

This contrast reflects upon the power and weakness of text.  If humans cling nurture the values of the past, text can multiply and remain within our social consciousness.  But just imagine what would happen if we placed The Diamond Sutra into the water.  Ideas that have life on paper would disintegrate into the impermanence of nature.  Perhaps we have to accept that even the grandest and deepest of human thoughts must dissipate into the constant shifting of nature.

The Chinese Art Book: Introduction

I remember one of my professors explaining how viewing cultural history from a chronological perspective generalizes the narrative as progressive, or future work "improves" from the past.  This isn't just a symptom of our capitalist society, where the passage of time provides growth.  It's also been used by Chinese dynasties to criticizes the flaws of the past.  Historical narratives written by dynasties tend to distort the narratives of its previous dynasty.  This doesn't mean that everything in the past must be inferior to the present, but we should at least be aware of such distortion trying to explain the values of a culture.

So the next thing I'll attempt is a series of art critique in The Chinese Art Book by Colin Mackenzie, Katie Hill, and Jeffrey Moser. Chinese art seems completely alien to the Western world because the viewer has to relearn all the historical context and baggage behind the art.  At least Western art is familiarized in our everyday world, like the mosaic in a church or lingerie on a billboard.  But why is Confucius on a can condensed milk? Question for the philosophers.

The Chinese Art Book does not place the pictures of artistic works in chronological order, rather each open page is a binary to the other side.  As the book jacket puts it, "The dialogue between each couple invites meanings that often go far beyond those of the individual works."
The next project I'll attempt on Blogger will attempt to figure out why The Chinese Art Book makes these binaries.  I will try my best to make these themes relatable to those unfamiliar with Chinese culture, but at certain point I'll have to delve into Chinese history.  Understanding Chinese culture is like trying to understand an episode of the Simpsons.  I remember showing The Simpsons to a guy from Shanghai, and I had to pause the video every 10 seconds because each joke derived from a unique aspect of American culture.  When a Westerner looks at Chinese culture, it's like a version of The Simpsons that lasted 3000 years.

My Tumblr thing was a complete failure.  It was boring and completely devoid of context.  Pandering to the internet crowd was pointless. Screw it, I'll write what I want. I want to do this because my bigger project involves delving into Chinese art, trying to pinpoint the artistic details that the Chinese saw in art.

Trauma and the TeoChew Identity

For those unfamiliar with the TeoChew culture, geographically it's a small subset of ethnic Chinese people who originate in the Chaozhou region of China.  It's about a full day bus ride northeast of Hong Kong.
The Wikipedia article on TeoChew people leaves the reader confused with various tidbits of trivia.  It lacks cohesion as to why people center around this cultural identity.  Many of those who even know their ancestral ties belong to this cultural group find it has little to no relevance to who they are now.

If we strip away the material behind culture, what ethos remains?

For America, it's "We the people."  The people have sovereignty over their decisions and fate.  For the British, it's the beginning of industrialization and being at the forefront of creating a globalist machine.  For the sports fan, it's the athlete moves or moves something with the right timing.

I believe the the ethos of TeoChew people revolves around exile and trauma.

Here's some more detail with what I mean through geography and political history.

The word TeoChew(潮州) literally translates to "Tide State." The Chaozhou region is surrounded by high, rocky cliffs.  The water flows into many river deltas, which mix with the subtropical humidity creates an inhospitable swamp.  Sea water rises and falls and the swamp and ocean encroach on each other's territory.  The region has little farmland.  One must rely on the ebbs and flows of nature to survive.

Because this region is ideal for alligators, mosquitoes and disease, the Chinese royal court would send unwanted people and ministers, hoping that they would die riddled with disease in the sweltering heat, or at least a typhoon to have a roof collapse on their heads.

One of the most famous political dissidents was Han Yu during the Tang dynasty.  He was exiled for arguing against allowing the cremated knuckle bones of the Buddha to enter Chang An.  Although he visited the TeoChew region for only a few months and wasn't a native to the TeoChew region, his political satire "Memorial to the Alligator" 祭鱷魚文 was, and still is, a text to embolden the outcast.  The text is about how he uses will of the son of heaven to banish the evil alligators.  But if one were to read the text more carefully, it's evil people that prey on the people.  Once history provided distance to review the life of Han Yu, many saw the exiled man as a courageous dissident.  

Many historical figures thereafter used the legacy of HanYu through the TeoChew region as a bastion for the righteous dissident.

Improved seafaring technology allowed TeoChew people to then cross the South China Sea into Southeast Asia.

The modern push for diaspora of TeoChew people was due to the invasion of Japanese imperial troops during WWII and the Chinese civil war.  Chinese Republican soldiers were forcing able bodied men to fight, and the Japanese were looting and destroying everything in sight.  This was why my grandparents left their homeland.

The second major shuffle occurred with TeoChew Cambodians and Vietnamese during the 1960's and 70's.  The Vietnam War and Cambodian genocide occurred only one generation after WWII.  Communism in China is at a pique, and TeoChew culture is seen as belonging to the "Four Olds" under the Mao regime.

A curious thing suddenly happens.  TeoChew people could not physically return to their native territory, nor were many TeoChew people seen as fully assimilated into the foreign lands they immigrated too. Some decided to cling onto the remains of TeoChew identity, some decided to fully assimilate into their surrounding culture.

A generation after that chaos, we end up back to the present.  I am fortunate enough to be one of the few people in my generation who can read Mandarin, read classical Chinese, and be able to watch TeoChew opera.  I am also fortunate to know personally people in my parent's and grandparent's generation to identify themselves with this ethnic group.  

Still, I'm debating whether this culture is relevant to me.  I do not fully identify with it, nor do I have attachment and nostalgia towards it.  In fact, I assumed many in my generation were satisfied with the answers already available.  But many would still randomly bring up questions.  Perhaps with continued dialogue I can help others find answers.  Maybe I'll find some answers myself.

Classical Words of the Day: April 3rd, 2015

Adjectival phrases of more than one syllable are followed by the noun modifier, 之

士shi4
knight

豪傑hao2jie2
heroic

若夫豪傑之士
As for heroic knights



Comparative degree is expressed by the coverb 於，which takes on the meaning "than."

望wang4
to hope

則無望民之多於鄰國也
then do not hope that your people will be more than [those of] neighboring countries (Mencius 1A/3)






Reference:  Pulleyblank, Edwin G. Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar. Vancouver [B.C.: UBC, 1995. Print.