Chinese calligraphy : an introduction to its aesthetic and technique : with 6 plates and 155 text illustratons

COMPOSITION

arranged in a sequence that can be fitly likened to a fine family, an intimate relationship, a ‘family likeness’, and an ordered dignity.?

To arrive at general rules of composition is very difficult. The number of Chinese characters runs into many thousands, and although the space occupied by each is, in K‘a-Shu at least, roughly equal, no two are composed alike; the number of strokes varies from one to more than twenty; the general form may be dense or loose, broad or slender, heavy or light ; even the component strokes have different kinds of movement —bending, stretching, covering, and so on (see Chapter VIII). Wang Hsi-Chih’s ‘ Eight Components of the Character ““ Yung’’’ offers reliable guidance in composition, but the instruction is too highly concentrated for any but calligraphers of some experience. Later critics, as explained on page 152, extended Wang’s eight types of stroke into thirty-two ‘Postures’. In the T‘ang dynasty the famous calligrapher Ou-Yang Hsiin devised independently a set of thirty-six rules. The Ming writer Li Ch‘un (4 @) expounded as many as eighty-four. I shall not attempt to explain all these ‘laws’, but in order to give the reader some idea of how to analyse and appreciate composition, I shall select arbitrarily those which in my view are most important.

The first requisite in the composition of a character is that it should stand stably on its foot (or feet) without an appearance of lameness or stumbling. Those characters which have a vertical stroke down the middle are obviously the easiest to

1 Those desirous of pursuing the subject of composition in detail will find in the books listed in the Bibliography at the end of this volume all the main ‘rules’ and principles.

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