All About Style in Chinese Calligraphy

Series Summary

The Chinese language has produced many poets studied all over the world, including Du Fu, Bai Juyi, and Li Po. Thousand of poems from these three authors remain, some translated by famous writers such as Ezra Pound and others featured in productions at Disney’s Epcot Center. Chinese is written in characters, and much debate has arisen concerning how exactly these figures became associated with the words or ideas they represent. Some scholars believe much of the Chinese system is made up of ideograms and pictograms, symbols that look like the things they represent. Other scholars consider Chinese more abstract, claiming that the characters represent words or sounds without trying to look like anything at all, like letters in English.

In this free video series, expert Bo Feng shows you tips for writing Chinese characters properly. The long tradition of calligraphy has developed techniques for writing that will make your characters seem more authentic. Bo teaches you three grids that work as imaginary guides while writing authentic Chinese charcters, the huizhi, mizhi, and juigond grids. He helps you maintain proper weight in your strokes, and how to compose your characters with even distributions of ink and space. You will also learn some of the history of the Chinese library of characters as scripts changed and evolved.

Video Transcript

"And we cover strokes in previous series and here I'm going to talk to you about some structured points about forming the Chinese characters. And besides being a writing system, the Chinese characters or Chinese calligraphy, in particular, is a art. So, a lot of design principles apply to it and in ancient times, or even now, a lot of Chinese painting practitioners or Chinese painters, they use brush and ink to practice or to create their art. And sometimes you don't know whether they actually get a lot of training in Chinese calligraphy first or they later on, after practice painting, Chinese painting, they had to define the importance of Chinese calligraphy and start training in that. So, it is said that two arts intermingle with each other and learn from each other and so the spatial artist aspect of design elements are applied to it."