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Calligraphy: A Cultural Treasure of China

Calligraphy is the quintessence of Chinese culture. There have emerged some 1,000 kinds of written languages in the world. First, they were used to record events and what people wanted to say. In writing, people strive to make the scripts look beautiful and elegant. To meet special needs, they are written in artistic styles. The writing of Chinese characters has been developed into a special high-level art.

Chinese calligraphy has flourished for several thousand years. Like painting, sculpture, poetry, music, dance and opera, it is a full member of the family of arts. Calligraphy can be found everywhere in China, and is closely linked to daily life. In addition, it leads other arts in the number of people who practice it.

Signboards with inscriptions by famous figures are often found in shops and shopping centers, adding an antique elegance to busy and noisy trading areas. Calligraphic works also decorate sitting rooms, studies and bedrooms. The Chinese characters are written on Xuan paper, which is good at absorbing ink. The work will be Chinese Calligraphy pasted on a piece of thick paper with a silk edge, and then mounted on a scroll or put into a picture frame for hanging on a wall. Usually, the calligraphic work contains a poem, a pair of couplets or a mono the host likes very much.

If the calligraphic work is written by the host himself, it will demonstrates his aspiration and interest as well as his literary or artistic talent. A calligraphic work can bring a traditional sitting room of a scholar.

Calligraphy had been a recognized branch of painting since pre-Tang times. It was especially popular in the Yuan dynasty because of its long association with the pursuits of the wenren. Along with poetry and music, calligraphy was considered an important part of the scholar-gentleman's training; examples of writing were commonly given to friends to commemorate an occasion or to acknowledge hospitality. Calligraphy, like painting, attests to the nearly infinite uses of the brush. Characters were depicted in a variety of styles, ranging from the archaic glyphs taken from bronze vessels to the free-form varieties reminiscent of Zen painters.

All of the images seen here represent a language, that, in and of itself is art. It is a pictographic language, and it is very easy to make out what the character is conveying, just as easy as a child in the west can use a pictionary to decipher words like horse, and moon. A child reading their own language in China, however, would skip the part where a picture equals a word, as the picture is the word in Chinese.