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“In Chinese calligraphy, you try to present the word in its most beautiful form. How that beauty presents itself is up to you. You can turn a dot into a stroke, or a 又 into a X. As long as the final character is legible and can be read. There is no wrong way of writing.”
This blew my mind 🤯.
After spending over 20 twenty years working with precision through vector softwares, the idea of imperfect work still scares me. Of course it’s gotten a little less scary since Oddjects, Zoometry, and Wild. I thought, if I made enough things that were weird and imperfect then somehow, they’d become normal and acceptable too. But to be told now that even something as old as Chinese calligraphy that is rooted in tradition and history is so forgiving and free… bye rock, I’m moving out.
Bilingual was the motivation to take up calligraphy lessons, the fear of doing something wrong and being disrespectful to an ancient craft weighed heavily on me and made progress on the project more difficult than it should be.
I first started noticing the teacher’s tendency to defer from different stroke forms early on but simply thought perhaps I’d been writing words wrongly my entire life. In one of the last few classes, someone finally spoke up and asked, “isn’t that wrong?”
“It’s up to you…” the reply from the teacher was cut short, in a class of 20 to 1, the teacher had too many more questions to answer.
Finally, in the last lesson, she explained.
In class, she teaches us Chinese calligraphy in the style of Yan Zhengqing. That was the style she learnt in her youth. And that is the style she enjoys the most. However, there are many schools of calligraphy to learn from. Each style has its own practice and beliefs.
To become a good calligrapher requires practice, and practice starts with imitating the greats. A good foundation means understanding what makes your writing beautiful. And once you understand that, you can start to do things differently.
Being different didn’t mean it was wrong or bad. It was simply a voice, a personality, perhaps even a fingerprint, something unique only to you.
Germaine Chong (Shu)
@shu.anonymous