For our meeting on December 1st, we had a guest speaker, Dr. Gonzalo T. Chua, who talked to us about Chinese calligraphy and painting. He mentioned how Chinese writing first started out as pictures of objects and signs representing the concepts in a script called Oracle bone script. For example, the word “fish” in this script looks like a fish.
As the scripts evolved, they got less pictorial and more like the characters we see today. The Greater seal script consisted of pictographs, and it later evolved to the Lesser Seal Script which was more logographic with symbols rather than objects. The Lesser Seal Script later evolved to the Clerical script where the characters were more unified for documentation on bamboo scrolls. The Clerical script then evolved to the Standard script where each stroke is slowly and carefully printed.
The Standard script is the most easily and widely recognized script. The Standard script later evolved to the Running script which is like cursive writing where the whole character is quickly done in one single stroke. The Running script later Cursive script where it is very irregular and sketchy, allowing the artist to be more artistic in their writing. The last script, which I believe I learned in high school in my Mandarin class, is the Simplified script which is just a more simplified version of the Standard script.
Something that Dr. Chua mentioned was how different dialects of Chinese can understand the same script. Growing up, I had some knowledge of two different dialects, but I never knew this because I never really learned how to read and identify characters. It was really cool to learn of this fact. Dr. Chua also mentioned how Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, and Vietnamese characters were adopted and adapted from the Chinese characters.
After talking about calligraphy, he went on to present and talk about painting. He had a bunch of photos of paintings to show us. I think the biggest takeaway from the presentation was how the painters don’t paint what they see, but rather they paint what they understand. For example, rather than just copying and painting a view of a mountain, they paint a really tall mountain-like structure capturing how they understand that mountains are really tall.
Another thing that I found interesting was how all painters and calligraphers stamped their final pieces with a seal. If someone really liked the painting, they would also stamp the piece with their seal which I found really interesting. My only question though is, what happens when there isn’t any space left to stamp the painting?
After going through the slides, Dr. Chua showed us some paintings of his which he surprised us by saying that we could keep. His paintings were incredible, and I ended up keeping a painting of a lion on a clifftop. He also gave each of us an opportunity to do some doodling on the cloth that I had mentioned in the Sit-in Chinese class. This time there were no boxes or characters, it was just blank. Along with doodling, we got to watch him paint a fish which was crazy because he made it seem so easy and effortless.