An Unbounded Enthusiasm,The Modern Calligraphy of Wei Ligang

For art historians, the emergence of a new form of art can serve as a marker for the beginning of a new moment in a civilization, a wrinkle of change within a culture.

 

This often takes place within the art of painting, because it is accessible to the many. Anyone rich in spirit, even a child or someone very poor, can draw and paint. And if a work, whether that of a master or a child, springs from the depths of culture and is imbued with the soul of that culture, the symbolism involved in the representation will be easily transmitted and understood, perhaps even loved. It will be inconceivable to imagine that art arising in any other place at any other time.

 

As with successful politicians or revolutionists, artists are products of their culture. They bob to the surface of a cultural wave to meet the challenges they face, sometimes with lives hanging in the balance. Always, it is their emergence, exploration, seeking and their becoming within their cultures that is represented in the images they create, whether they speak for one or all.

 

We see this in the work and career of Beijing artist Wei Ligang, one of our era's better-known practitioners of modern calligraphy (xindai shufa), an art form that has been emerging for the past 20 years, but not without a bit of controversy and not unlike what was seen with the rise of Impressionism in France, when people physically attacked some of the first works shown.

 

A practitioner well-versed in the traditional methods of Chinese calligraphy, Wei, who now resides in Tongzhou District, has moved away from that practice in his work to something he describes as a post-modern search for his own meaning. Yet, Wei and other modern calligraphy artists respect the classical practice and the foundation it has provided.

 

In all modern calligraphy, attention is given to line, speed of stroke and aggressiveness in styles, things that Wei said "are important to any Asian artist."

 

Wei's accomplishments in his work were recently recognized by the Asian Cultural Council (ACC), an affiliate of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, in New York City, which in 2005 awarded Wei with a four-month-long Dr. Joseph K.W. Li Arts Fellowship that allowed him to observe contemporary art developments in the United States and to meet with his friends and admirers of his work there.

 

Wei, who was born in 1964 in Datong, Shanxi Province, was among the first of the ACC fellows, along with artists Dikdik Sayahdikumullah of Indonesia and Hung Keung of Hong Kong, to be given a show by the ACC, Crossing Boundaries, in Hong Kong in 2005. He also lectured and showed his work in New York City.

 

As one of the organizers of the Bashu Parade: '99 Chengdu Retrospective of Chinese Modern Calligraphy at the End of the 20th Century exhibition in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, in June 1999, an event that is growing in stature over time, Wei has been at the forefront of modern calligraphy’s development from the beginning.

 

That said, modern calligraphy could one day be a misnomer, if it isn't already, because among some of its practitioners, there is no effort within it to "save" calligraphy or any attempt to breathe new life into a rigid classical form. Instead, it marks a culmination of something found in the classical form and a jumping off point for something new. The results range from the sublime to the crude, from mere copying to the kind of imitation that can lead a viewer back to the core of the classical presentation or to a gross incongruity.

 

An artist in step with its time Wei views the new form as a horizon-seeking, boundless determination, completely in tune with new China and new Beijing's aspirations on the world stage. Wei's friend, Yang Yingshi, himself a calligrapher and writer, would write seven years ago: "Modern calligraphy has for long been hovering outside the context of contemporary international culture, unable to enter the philological context of modern art." But Wei has never wavered in his determination to seek exactly that result.

 

"The award gave me a gate through which I could enter the international world. I want to use Chinese inspiration to make international art."

 

Wei, who was recognized as a calligraphy prodigy after taking it up at the age of 9 and who ended up graduating from Tianjin's Nankai University in 1985 with a degree in mathematics, said traditional Chinese writing and script was once considered as something so universal that it was adopted as the written form of many non-Han Chinese writing systems, including minority groups in China and the Vietnamese. In that regard, it was an understood abstraction, adopted because of its utility. Over the centuries, Chinese calligraphy became more and more abstract and refined, with some forms all but unintelligible to any but their creators, yet Wei maintains the universal nature of Chinese script, and a Chinese culture without it can hardly be imagined.

 

In the post-modern application, Wei said, "It is an abstraction of an abstraction, but with a different [though still Chinese] meaning. For foreigners, almost any calligraphy is very abstract, because they don't understand it, but for a Chinese calligrapher, each style has its own meaning and can be said to be realistic."

 

Modern calligraphy is, in some ways, beset by problems resulting from its ties to traditional calligraphy, which sparks resistance to its alleged "rebelliousness" in some quarters inside China, and in its development as an internationally recognized art form.

 

Of the former, Wei said, "The new style is a threat to classical calligraphy, but this will force the classical to become more pure, with strict attention to form." As some modern calligraphers heed the call to the classical, they live "at the border of calligraphy." But in Wei's style, "We are not concerned with calligraphy; we use its strokes."

 

His works are unbounded and soar past horizons, yet find their basis in the brush, the stroke and the line, creating a new classical feeling in accord with a sense of beauty that the Chinese culture is bringing forth in the here and now.

 

On the international side, Wei said the Chinese approach has taken place within three general orientations: "First we learned from foreigners, as with oil painting. Then we engaged in East-West cooperation using western languages and Chinese and western materials. This was not 100 percent Chinese. In the third phase, we will see Chinese artists using their own languages and their own materials."

 

"Some, especially Xu Bing (now residing in New York), think the second phase is the way to go and they haven't stopped experimenting. Instead of using ink and paper, they use other media, but some have lost interest in this because there is no soul in it for them."

 

Unavoidable comparisons are made between modern Chinese calligraphic works and Chinese classical and western works, and some will no doubt assert "imitation," but viewers should not be misled. Much of the effort within modern calligraphy is not imitation in the sense of mere copying. It is instead a kind of abstraction of an imitation that amounts to a very personal identification with the broadest of universal cultural possibilities of human beings, a willing acceptance of all things beautiful and an addition to them. It recognizes new possibilities within another new possibility, modern China. In fact, it would be hard to imagine one without the other.

 

Still, some modern calligraphers stick closely to traditional calligraphy in their work.

 

"We know calligraphy very well. We're not borrowing. There's a 'plan'; you can't go to America to learn to be a calligraphy master. We grew up in it."

 

Lastly, and importantly, Wei said, "The Chinese Government will now support change in the modern culture. In recent centuries, things were not too good; China was too weak."

 

"The goal is not to arrive at a new form, but to make the trip," he said, and in making the trip, Wei realizes the art form will not escape its cultural connotation or importance.

 

"The United States is strong for many reasons, because of its military, economic and its artistic power. China has been weak, but now we will have a strong military, a strong economy and great art."

 

In the global context, he said, "Western and eastern are heading in the same direction, but we're coming from different directions."

 

Wei is conscious of the timeliness of his art and the fact that it is forward-looking, but he said this does not have to include a denigration of the classical past.

 

"China cannot always be behind in the world. Foreigners like Beijing's hutong and the Great Wall, but we have new Great Walls to build."

 

He said he disagreed with calls such as that of the great writer Lu Xun and other May Fourth Movement personalities of the early 20^th century that the centuries-old Chinese script should be scrapped in favour of a Romanized script to aid modernization. He feels the same about sacrificing China's cultural relics to pave the way for progress.

 

On the one hand, Chinese script reflects the soul of the country and has a modern role to play; on the other, "Instead of tearing down the old Beijing city wall, we should have built a new city outside the wall. Let's build the new tall buildings where we can see the horizon and look out."

 

Still, in the soul of the self-described post-modernist lurks a classical sentimentality.

 

"We have wasted ourselves in building 'too many' and 'too fast' in the pursuit of the good and thrifty. Beijing deserves to have more places like Tian'anmen Square, the Paris Opera House, the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre."

 

In step with its time, Wei said, modern calligraphy is becoming more artful by the day.

 

"People are spending more time on it, and they're experimenting with colour, forms, frames and space…Some are exploring the ‘soul of the lines' of the characters, something that's very important to all Asian artists, without regard to the meaning of the characters as characters."

 

When considering the lines and marks of western drawing, particularly that of the highly skilled Picasso, Wei said, "His lines have no detail; but a Chinese line has character, detail, texture and soul. When a western artist uses a brush, he makes a mark, but with Chinese brushes 20 or 30 things are going on with each spin of the brush. If a line is small, people can't get into it. If it's large and soulful, it will draw you in."

 

And, as with some classical calligraphy and in western and eastern watercolour techniques, the "happy accident" has a role to play, but, he said, his use of it is similar to American artist Jackson Pollock's command of the drip. "It's all under control."

 

Much is being demanded of modern calligraphy artists, and their debt to classical calligraphy and some western art is obvious, but as the late German historian Oswald Spengler wrote, "This imitation should be understood as the 'copying of a destiny,' " in response to it.

 

"Imitation expresses something accomplishing itself."