Chinese Calligraphy

Being Chinese, I have been around Chinese calligraphy for quite some time. When I was young, I knew it was an art form, but I was never told what made the calligraphy so beautiful when done correctly and it never occurred to me to ask. Even though I went to Chinese school for about 5 or so years and we did calligraphy multiple times, we were never taught why the strokes are the way they are, just to copy what was put in front of us. 

It wasn't until my sophomore year of college when a young calligrapher from China stayed at my mother's home in New Hampshire that I learned the basics of calligraphy aesthetics. His name is Yu-Le and he was taught by one of the best modern calligraphers in China. For those who are curious, he was in New Hampshire because he was collaborating on a Chinese dictionary project with a professor at Dartmouth. Yu-Le had to hand write all of the characters and when I saw them, I thought they were printed from the computer because they were so small yet clean.When I went home for winter vacation, he was kind enough to give me some basic calligraphy lessons for free. 

He told me, what made good Chinese calligraphy good is that all strokes of the character must flow together and there must be a balance of think and thin strokes. The first two images below were drawn by him as a gift to me and my boyfriend and are characters of our Chinese names. If you look carefully, you can see where the pressure of the brush was lifted up to end a stroke, but a "hook" is left leading the way to the beginning of the next stroke. In some areas, a thin trail of ink is visible from one stroke to another. By doing this, it causes all of the strokes to flow together, creating one harmonious character that has movement. It is quite difficult to get this simple concept right when you are actually doing it. My "hooks" were either too long, or two short, or didn't have that beautiful point pointing to the next stroke. Another aspect of getting the character to flow is it must be drawn with one continuous motion, you cannot stop in the middle of one and you shouldn't need to stop to change direction for the next stroke. 

There also needs to be a balance of thick and thin strokes for variation and balance. One section of the character cannot be heavier than the other because that throws off the balance thus making it not aesthetically pleasing. Using all thick strokes causes the character to look too heavy and using all thin stokes causes it to look too light and loose. Usually there is a pattern of the thin and thick strokes. 

The last thing I remember him telling me is to write the characters at an angle. This is probably for the same reason as why sometimes we write words on a diagonal, to make the composition more dynamic and interesting to look at. I never noticed that good calligraphy characters were written on an angle until he told me. It's subtle, but makes a huge difference. 

The third picture is one I found from Google of not so good calligraphy. Granted I don't know what the original use of this character was, but I'm going to point out why it doesn't work as a good calligraphy piece anyways. There are no tails or leads between the strokes that makes all of them flow together, making the character look very static. This thickness of each stroke is more or less the same thickness, bringing no visual variation to it and making it a bit heavy, and even though it does look like it was written at a small angle, the angle could be bigger. The character is just there to be read and not admired. 

These are just the basic concepts, but I feel not a lot of people know this, including Chinese people. I took a Japanese calligraphy class at college and the teacher didn't mention any of this. I thought everyone in the class would appreciate knowing what to strive for to write beautiful characters instead of just copying a printed one. I felt like they were missing out on some basic techniques and figured I can at least share them with this class since we are studying type and graphic design. Even though the Chinese language is a completely different system than English, the same approach to what makes a writing piece beautiful is still the same. Every part has to flow together and there must be balance and variation. 

- Catherine

PS: One of the hand drawn/written (I can't decide what word is appropriate to use) characters is better than the other one, can you tell which one?