and thoughts and concepts.
Old and new works – mostly new. And it’s about more than a few brush strokes.
When Chinese people see my calligraphy, especially the one written in the traditional style (portfolio), they usually shower me with praise and emphasize that they could never do it that well. The second part of this statement is true. Calligraphy is a very challenging discipline – and who has the time for it today? The first part of the statement should be qualified. I don’t think my classical calligraphy deserves any mention. But one can safely say that there are not so many “long noses” who can do Chinese calligraphy and of those who have dealt with it, only a few have delved into the depths of this art. Because it is a particularly high art form that stands above painting in Asia.
Calligraphy as a basis for art
Not only is calligraphy the basis of all traditional Chinese painting as you not only train your brushwork skills, which is difficult enough, but you also sharpen your compositional skills. If a character is to be good, it has to meet a whole series of criteria that we as Western observers are not even aware of and that go beyond our horizon.
In the extra part, I will try to use a single character to indicate the dimension of the whole thing.
Below are 3 examples of simpler characters with approaches to good composition.
I don’t even ask myself the question of whether I will reach a high level at some point. But for me, it’s also about learning something that then flows into my other work, like painting. So I would like to show a few minor examples which in a way are the transition from calligraphy to painting. Chinese characters are often both heavy and seem to float at the same time. They seem simple (after all they’re just a few brush strokes), but they’re quite difficult to write. Every character is applied philosophy. Pure Dao. I’ve already written about that. And all of this should resonate in my playing with it, as well as the poetic touch that is inherent in Chinese calligraphy. [1]
Advanced calligraphy
Over the years I have also developed my own techniques and started incorporating calligraphy into various works. They are often works in which Far Eastern and Western aspects come together. Most of the time it is philosophical ideas that are in the foreground.
As a representative of this series, I would like to introduce a work that will initially leave most people who see it, whether Western or Chinese, a little clueless. It is an antique chromolithograph that shows an oil painting by Hans Holbein the Younger, a picture of the Madonna. I used it as a base and painted over it with a slogan from Mao Zedong.
Holbein’s Madonna is as iconic in Western culture as Mao Zedong’s calligraphy is in Eastern culture. When an uneducated Chinese person sees Holbein’s picture, he is likely to see a group of strangely dressed people. Perhaps he sees a wealthy man with his main wife, concubines, and children. The Westerner, on the other hand, sees the lettering in red – which more people in Asia are certainly familiar with than the Holbein picture – as a series of lines and dots. The bottom line of the mental game is that we will never understand anything about other cultures if we don’t engage with them. And wherever that may take us.
I also tried other things with ephemera, in the following case a poem by Mao Zedong on a rotten leaf. Of course, this is about the topic of transience.
Or a slogan by Mao Zedong on an old Romanian bill for weedkiller. [2]
It is this artwork that is particularly close to my heart. Of course, I am aware that it again can seem confusing. Hardly anyone will probably be able to make a connection to the here and now. What is it about?
At different times and in different countries there have been potentates who have called dissidents vermin or similar. Unfortunately, we are well on our way to doing that again today. As stated in the last post about happiness, first comes the thought, then the word, and then it’s not far from the action. Intellectuals in particular always quickly became “vermin”. In Pol Pot‘s Cambodia, wearing glasses was enough to be considered an intellectual. Reason enough for banishment to penal camps – or even extermination. When politicians use such words – or less explicit terms – or when they begin to target the intellectuals (Universities are always particularly important to them, but of course also investigative journalists), one should begin to be vigilant.
Painted calligraphy
What I’m working on very intensively at the moment is another technique that I created, which involves repeatedly writing poems on top of each other. At some point, a kind of texture emerges, and then a poetic touch. One could easily assume that you don’t need to be careful when writing, after all, it ends up being a shambles. Well, the experience made me understand that every mistake has an impact. In my post, after next I will go into this in more detail and there will then be a unique opportunity to follow the creation of these works step by step.
extra
The traditional Kangxi Dictionary, published in 1716, contains around 47,000 characters, but many of them are archaic or rare – and no one knows even half of them. You can read a newspaper with 3500, and high school students can read 5-6000 characters. But they also have to be learned first – and that is a very tedious matter. One wrong line or wrong dot in a character and it means something completely different.
Let’s focus on a single character, chosen at random. Let’s get a first impression of the complexity of Chinese writing using this relatively simple character, 喝 (hē, to drink), consisting of 13 lines in the graphic below.
a) 喝 at the top represents the standard font as we see it in newspapers or books. To the right is a selection of the same character in font styles that are still used in calligraphy today: large seal script (大篆书), small seal script (小篆书), running script (行书). They look quite different, but they are the same character.
b) For this to work at all, children learn from an early age what the correct order of the individual lines in a character is.
c) The whole thing becomes interesting when art comes into play, as is particularly the case in the grass writing style (草书). There are specialized books that list how calligraphers Wang and Zhou and Li… wrote the characters. This way I could write a text in the style of a calligrapher who has been dead for centuries.
d) The same character 喝 , written by a Zen Buddhist monk. So we can easily see what worlds open up, especially when we come across characters that consist of 30 strokes – and that only in the design of a character.
footnotes:
[1] Some may wonder what could be Dao or Zen about it. Try to look at the two images in terms of how each dark spot “communicates” with each other. This is one of the essences of Zen, that we are all connected. And quantum physics has now proven this. The Dao aspect is, among other things, the naturalness and informality with which the lines were put on paper, wu wei. And above all playing with opposites such as light :: dark, dynamic :: calm etc. Or the flow of power, Qi 汽.
[2] Mao Zedong and Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu (1918-1989) had more in common than communism itself. A trip by Ceaușescu to China and North Korea in 1971 brought him into contact with the personality cult practiced there. Inspired by this, he began to consistently transfer this to Romania.
related link: new yearbook is out
Shops: FriedrichZettl.com – Saatchiart. Media: Blog – Youtube – Instagram
Leave a Reply