Chinese calligraphy

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Calligraphy is an art dating back to the earliest day of history, and widely practiced throughout China to this day. Although it uses Chinese words as its vehicle of expression, one does not have to know Chinese to appreciate its beauty. Calligraphy, in essence, is an abstract art.

East Asian calligraphy typically uses ink brushes to write Chinese characters (called Hanzi in Chinese, Kanji in Japanese, and Hanja in Korean). Calligraphy (in Chinese, Shufa 書法, in Japanese Shodō 書道, in Korean, Seoyae 書藝, all meaning "the way of writing") is considered an important art in East Asia and the most refined form of East Asian painting.

Image:Su shi-calligraphy.jpg The style of Chinese calligraphy has evolved continually for thousands of years. About 213 B.C., under the famous emperor Qin Shi Huang, who perpetrated the "burning of the books," the Prime Minister Li Si drew up an official index of characters and unified the written form for the use of scholars. This is Zhuanshu and contained more than 3,000 characters. From that time to the present, there have been five major styles of calligraphy. They are Zhuanshu (seal style), Lishu (scribe style), Kaishu (block style), Xingshu (semi-cursive style), and Caoshu (cursive style, literally "grass-writing style"). All five styles of writing are still in use today. Image:Meng fa shi bei.jpg

The main categories of Chinese-character calligraphy
English name	Hanzi	Pinyin	Japanese
Seal script	篆書	Zhuànshū	Tensho
Clerical script (Official script)	隷書	Lìshū	Reisho
Regular Script (Block script)	楷書	Kǎishū	Kaisho
Running script (Semi-cursive Script)	行書	Xíngshū	Gyōsho
Grass script (Cursive script)	草書	Cǎoshū	Sōsho

For regular script characters, the character basically fits into a square space, with each character of roughly the same size and proportion. Learners of Chinese characters are likely to encounter this form first, and in learning to write Chinese characters the form enables the student to appreciate the proportions of each part of the character as well as each character stroke. Though brushpen has been used for over two thousand years, today, most students begin with pencil or pens, and the calligraphy of modern handwriting is also a challenge to read for those with expressive running hand script.

Grass script is notorious for its economy of individual penstrokes. Quite often different characters written in the regular script form may resemble each other when written in grass script.

The clerical script is highly stylised, a development from seal script form. They are highly angular in appearance, and as a precursor to regular script, for modern readers of Chinese characters, they are highly legible, compared to grass script, or seal script.

Seal scripts are regularised scripts, which are noted for the uniformity of thickness and space of vertical, horizontal and curved lines. By its very name, the main use are found on seals or chops. Seal carving is one branch of Chinese calligraphy, and considered as a high art, since it expresses the carver's calligraphy and artistic expression in fitting a number of characters (the majority of which are of seal script form) into such a small area of space, and carved in reverse so that the imprint obtained gives the characters in their proper form. Moreover, due to the nature of the size of seals and lack of space, the development of Chinese characters have been affected by seal carving, since simplification of characters has often been practiced.

Calligraphy has influenced most major art styles in East Asia, including sumi-e, a style of Chinese and Japanese painting based entirely on calligraphy.

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