Home
» City specials
» Hangzhou
New Year’s pictures, calligraphy in spotlight
Print Edition
FOR foreigners who don’t read Chinese characters, the art of Chinese calligraphy might appear beautiful and exotic, yet not intelligible. An exhibition of Chinese couplets in Zhejiang Art Museum that is now underway is a good opportunity to shed some light on the art and culture and increase people’s understanding.
Chinese New Year couplet, or chunlian in Chinese, a pair of lines of meter in poetry, is displayed as part of the Spring Festival. They are seen on doorways of apartments, with text often expressing the very best wishes.
“It’s not necessary to first understand each character to appreciate the art,” said Si Shunwei, the director of the museum.
Indeed, Chinese calligraphy has five different styles, and most Chinese people only read three of them. The other two, cursive style and seal-character style, are often just as puzzling to Chinese people as they are to foreigners.
“The point is to observe its composition, balance, and the flow of the brush,” Si said.
The museum invites over 60 old, middle-aged and young artists in the province to create works for the exhibition.
Despite all of them being written on two vertical red or golden papers, the style of widely varies.
Seal-character style looks like a pictograph. Cursive style are those characters that are stringed together, and finished in one trait. They look wild, bold and untrimmed. Semi-cursive style characters are not held together, but in each character, most strokes are written by in one brush stroke.
However, even if they are of the same style, the same Chinese character written by different artists will look differently in its composition, shape and size, because each calligrapher has his own understanding and personal style.
Try to observe the Chinese character
“A good thing for those who do not read Chinese is to avoid a stereotype of reading the content more than appreciating the art,” said Si.
At a corner of the exhibition, ink, bush, red papers and a sample book are ready, encouraging visitors to make their own couplets.
Compared to the couplet exhibition, an exhibition of New Year Picture held in the museum is also traditional, and extremely easy to be understood.
A New Year Picture, in Chinese nianhua, is a form of Chinese colored woodblock print, used for decoration during the Chinese New Year Holiday.
New Year Pictures boast rather strong color contrast, and often use red, green, blue, purple, and yellow. Its subjects are mostly gods, people, and babies. Sometimes they are illustrations of well-known stories.
The 60-plus works on display are a collection of the print-making department of China’s Academy of Art in Hangzhou, which were collected from folk families during the 1950s and 1960s. Most works were produced a century ago.
In ancient times, nianhua were mass-produced and displayed for those who could not read, and thus they were usually printed with simple lines in bright and warm colors.
“Nianhua is one of ancient people‘s entertainment forms, like soap series,“ said Professor Cai Feng, the dean of the academy’s print-making department.
Despite the fact that the faces of people in nianhua are drawn with just a few lines, the costumes and accessories and the landscape as well as other subjects can be extremely detailed and complicated.
Professor Cai explained that this is due to the fact that traditional Chinese art does not emphasize on perspective, and many things were drawn plain. “The ancient Chinese people cannot stand that there is a dark shadow on his face in a portrait.”
Date: Chinese couplet exhibition runs through February 28 and the nianhua exhibition through February 26. The museum is open during the holidays, but closed on Mondays as usual.
Venue: Zhejiang Art Museum
Address: 138 Nanshan Rd
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
