What is Calligraphy?

•Chinese painting, poetry, and calligraphy are endlessly boundtogether in one beautiful art form

•The matching combination of pictures and calligraphicwords show the ideals of Asian art.• •In fact, Calligraphy—which literallytranslates as beautiful writing—is just as important as the inkpainting it.

o Chinese characters do not indicate their pronunciation, even for any single dialect.

o It is useful to be able to transliterate a dialect of Chinese into the Latin alphabet, for those who cannot read Chinese characters.

o Transliteration was not always considered a way to record the sounds of any particular dialect of Chinese; it was also considered a replacement for the Chinese characters.

Written Chinese is considered to be one of the world's oldest active, continuously used writing systems.

Many current Chinese characters have been traced back to the 商Shāng Dynasty about 1500 BCE, and the process of creating characters probably began some centuries earlier. Chinese characters were standardized under the

秦 Qín dynasty (221–206 BCE).

Over the millennia, these characters have evolved into well-developed styles of Chinese calligraphy.

•The Regular Script (often called standard script or simply kǎishū) is one of the last major calligraphic

styles to develop.

•As the name suggests, the Regular Script is "regular", with each of the strokes placed slowly and carefully, the brush lifted from the paper and all the strokes distinct from each

other.

•The Regular Script is also the easiest to recognize and read, as it

is the script in which most beginners learn to write Asian scripts.

Stars!(of writing Chinese)

Wang Xianzhi 王獻

之

Huai Su 懷素

•Calligraphy has remained a strong force in Chinese life up to the present.

• During the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, calligraphy continued to be a central  art of the highly educated people, closely associated both with painting and with the social and cultural life of the educated elite. 

• The Chinese landscape came to reflect the appreciation of calligraphy, as stones inscribed with the calligraphy of admired artists were made at famous sites.  Calligraphy could also be seen on temple name plaques, on shop signs, and on some of the very modest homes.  Calligraphy, as a result, formed an ever-present part of China's visual culture. 

Since Shang times Chinese has been written not with an alphabet-based script of the sort we are used to, but one with a symbol ("character") for  each word.  Many characters are made up of components, some of which can also stand on their own.  Often characters can be broken down into two major parts, one which indicates the general meaning of the word, and one which indicates the sound. 

•Even before printing was invented in China, the Chinese made other keeping and transmitting texts.

•A tracing copy could be made by tracing the outlines of each character onto paper that was specially treated to make it highly transparent; after the outlines were drawn, the characters were inked in.

•The more skilled calligraphers made free-hand copies, keeping the original close at hand as they wrote. Original calligraphy, even from the most famous hands, often did not survive because of the fragility of the silk or paper it was written on.