“The spiritual tradition, aesthetic tradition, and expressive tradition preserved within each calligraphic style flow into your brush as a living essence. When this happens, your innovation will not remain superficial—it won’t be like what one student described today as deliberately manufacturing a composition to force innovation. That kind of innovation is shallow. True innovation resides within life itself.
Let me illustrate with a concept you all know from Confucianism: ren(仁), the character formed by ‘person’ (亻) and ‘two’ (二). Today, we’ve abstracted it purely into an ethical norm—benevolence and morality—but what does ren truly mean? It carries the same essence as yuan (元) in the Qian Gua (乾卦, the Creative Hexagram). Ren is life. It is the seed of life. Think of almond kernels, peach kernels, plum kernels—is that not the ren? That kernel is the seed of life. Why does it have a hard shell? To protect the tender life within. As Laozi said, ‘the soft overcomes the hard.’ Softness is the origin of life. Excessive rigidity leads to death—a dead body becomes stiff, you see? But life is soft. Observe infants and children—their entire bodies are soft. Thus, the genesis of life lies precisely in this softness.
The I Ching (周易) elaborates extensively on this principle, which is why we practice calligraphy with the soft brush, not the hard pen. Objectively speaking, I hold a negative view of hard-pen calligraphy. Though it involves writing, it fundamentally lacks vitality. Even when some hard-pen works mimic calligraphic forms today, they achieve this only by borrowing techniques from brush calligraphy—such as lifting and pressing the brush tip—correct? Their principles all derive from our soft brush. Because the soft brush offers infinite possibilities, while the hard pen, in principle, offers very few.”
发表回复
要发表评论，您必须先登录。