Met Museum: Decoding Chinese Calligraphy

After having last week viewed Inoue Yūichi's abstract paintings of kanji, it made for an interesting sequel to yesterday visit the Met Museum's current exhibit entitled Out of Character: Decoding Chinese Calligraphy.  What was most striking here was the level of individuality that the artists shown were able to express in their work.  Though limited to five basic styles - seal, clerical, cursive, semi-cursive and standard - each was able, through his mastery of the brush, to impose on the characters a sense of his own personality.  This could most easily be seen in a collaborative work such as Writings in Praise of a Houseboat (c. 1500) in which thirteen prominent Ming dynasty officials, at the invitation of a doctor named Qian, put down side by side on the same handscroll their thoughts on the carefree lives of those who dwelled on the river.

Of the five calligraphic styles, the most aesthetically pleasing is easily the cursive.  Through its simplification of the forms of the characters, it allows the practitioner to write in long flowing lines without the need to lift the brush at every turn. At the opposite end is the standard style which immediately strikes one as regimented and mechanical.  Everything here is carefully controlled - the characters are all of uniform size and are evenly spaced.  Sometimes the standard style is even written on lined paper divided into blocks that only emphasize the regularity of the script.

A number of the works included in the exhibit are from the early seventeenth century, a period which saw the fall of the Ming, the last native Chinese dynasty, to the invading Manchus who in turn established the Qing dynasty that was to last into the twentieth century.  It was obviously a time of great social upheaval, and this turmoil is reflected in its calligraphy which often took on baroque and even decadent overtones. An entire section, entitled "Big and Rough," has been given over to these pieces.  The notes to this portion of the exhibit read:

"The calligraphy in this section was made to look bold, powerful—even strange. All these works were made during the seventeenth century, when many turned away from the pursuit of elegance and instead sought the fantastic, bizarre, and grotesque."

It was to these large size works that I felt most attracted.  My favorite was Poem by Wang Wei by Zhang Ruitu.  While the content of the short poem itself was calm and reflective, the powerful brushstrokes that rendered it were in contrast harsh to the point of violence. So much pressure was applied when writing out the characters that the hairs of the brush split to create an effect known as feibai ("flying white").  Another work in a similar though more controlled style that I found intriguing was Poem on a River Sojourn (1645) by Wang Duo.  The work was done in Nanjing, the city where the Ming court resided for a year in exile before its final collapse after the suicide of its last emperor in 1644.

The exhibit continues through August 17, 2014.