about the Chinese writing system.

A writing system is not exactly the same as calligraphy.

When we talk about calligraphy, we are

talking about the art of handwriting, the art of writing.

And what I want to do is first introduce some basic aspects

about the Chinese writing system.

And then get into a little bit of the discipline

of the practice of calligraphy.

And then that will, I think, get us into my main theme, or main idea,

is that in Chinese art-- and calligraphy

is the highest of the arts.

Well poetry, and then calligraphy.

But calligraphy.

And the visual arts is the highest of the arts.

And then painting comes next.

Is that when we think about art practice

now, or think about art and image making,

we talk in terms of representations.

That the image is always referring to something.

Referring to something outside of it.

And the whole discourse of art making-- certainly

teaching in an art school this is the case-- a whole discourse of art

making assumes that that's what art is about.

Whether we're talking about abstraction,

or installation art, performance art,

it's about referring something to something

beyond what it is you're seeing visually.

And I want to suggest that that's not really necessarily the best way

to think about Chinese calligraphy or Chinese painting.

That the real goal, if there is a goal,

in the practice of calligraphy traditionally

and the practice of painting traditionally,

is that it's about participation.

The world is something that we share.

The world is a collaborative project.

Human being is a collaborative project.

And that the real goal of this discipline practice

of creating something new is basically

the same sort of practice listed out of the mundane world of say,

for example, farming.

One of the analogies that I use in my classes,

the way that might help us understand

the way I'm thinking about the practice of calligraphy

and painting as fine arts in China traditionally,

is it's like farming.

And what is the goal of farming?

Farming doesn't really represent anything.

Farming's not directed to refer to something outside of it.

Farming is about producing bounty.

And producing bounty in the broadest sense.

Of fertility, of human creativity, of having families,

of having nutrition, of having bounty

so that families can perpetuate themselves

and create the human cycle in its relationship

with nature, in partnership with nature anew.

So I'm thinking about calligraphy and painting

as historically developing in China as that kind of process.

So let's start out with looking at a Chinese character.

This is the character xie, to write.

So this is the same Chinese character,

but in several different forms.

And so in my new-- I'm getting better

at fancy PowerPoint presentations.

So you see these different forms in the slide.

And they're all the same Chinese character.

So the first one, at the top, our sense is to try to go from the top

down in a kind of chronological sequence.

And that's partially true here, but it's not exactly true.

So some of these characters, these styles

of writing the same character, actually exist simultaneously.

And they certainly do so now.

So the first one, the oldest one though, is at the top.

It comes to be called seal script.

And I'll give you the Chinese and Mandarin pronunciation, zhuanshu.

And I'll show you some examples of that and the sources for that.

It originates with Bronze Age China.

And Henry was talking about it this morning and going back to 1600 BCE

and perhaps even earlier.

But a lot of the writing, the earliest surviving

writing that we have in the study of Chinese history,

dates from the Bronze Age.

These are inscriptions that were carved in to bone fragments that

were used in divination ceremonies by Shang dynasty royalty.

And some of them date to 1300 BCE and further back.

And also this style of writing is also

used to write inscriptions that are cast

into ceremonial bronze vessels.

Eventually I'll show you why in a moment,

why it comes to be called seal script.

So that's the earliest form of Chinese writing.

In the Han Dynasty, a period roughly about the same time as the Roman

republic and Roman Empire, 206 BCE to 220 in the common era.

The formal writing, document writing,

is done in what comes to be called lishu clerical script.

And so that's what you see here.

And this is close to what's down here, which is the regular script.

Which is basically, you might say, is a canonical standard form

for the writing of this character.

This is a kind of script that was used early on for taking notes.

It's called cursive or draft script.

Sometimes you'll encounter it in English sources translated

as grass script, because the character [CHINESE]

sometimes also means grass.

But it also means drafting or cursive.

So it's more appropriate to call it a cursive script.

And so that's what you see here.

It also becomes a style of writing that is picked up by calligraphers.

But it starts out as pretty much a way of shorthand note taking.

And then something in between called running script.

This is the standard here, if you write

the standard in a slightly more simplified form.

In a more fluid form, in a little bit more shorthand form,

you get this running script.

And then finally down here, a regular script,

kaishu, which is pretty much the standard font or standard

form of writing of this character that you'll see in publications.

Book fonts are based upon this and so on.

The bottom, the last one here, is a more modern concoction.

Aesthetically challenged from my point of view.

It's called simplified characters, jiantizi.

This is something that was developed during the modern period,

driven by educational reforms to help

some of these Chinese characters, like this one has

a lot of brush strokes in it.

So it's a complicated thing to learn how to write.

And so the idea is perhaps to simplify the writing system.

To make it a little bit easier for school children

to learn how to write.

So, the simplified characters.

Now the general cliche about Chinese characters

is that they are pictographs.

And that's not really true.

I'm going to show you a couple examples of pictographs,

or we call them pictographs.

That is to say, early forms of writing that

are sort of a picture, simplified pictures of the objects.

About 85% of Chinese characters are not pictographs.

And I'll show you what the bulk of Chinese characters, how

they're written and what they look like.

But a number of them are these kinds of pictures.

So this is a cart or chariot wheeled vehicle.

Or as one person once said to me, "wheeled conveyance."

And in Mandarin, pronounced che.

And so what you're looking at here is, in this chart,

a series of different versions of this character.

Which by the way, are not necessarily

an evolutionary development from an earlier form that

is more representational, such as this one,

to something that's a little bit more abstract.

Rather these are roughly simultaneous during the Bronze Age.

So I give you this little bit of dating here.

Bronze Age pictographs from circa 13th century BCE.

So there's no standardized written form.

This is actually one of the contributions

of the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang.

He is noted to have standardized the writing system.

So you can see all these variant forms.

And then down here is the regular script form

that emerges out of the early standard

and becomes later on the standard form, an image of a chariot

or cart.

Many Chinese characters are also graphs or visualization

of concepts.

And so here we have over and under, shang and xia.

And from the Bronze Age images, you see

this is a little form with a short line above it

and the short line is below it.

To suggest graphically the idea of above or underneath.

So sometimes those are called ideographs, graphing out of ideas.

You can actually combine characters to get

different characters by duplicating.

So we have two trees, and you get forest.

We have three trees and we get a thick forest.

And then also the meaning is dark and serious.

Or combining two different characters or two different,

in this particular case, pictographs.

The sun, or some entomologists identified this

as a window, but perhaps the sun.

And the crescent of the moon, and they

get the Chinese character for clear, brilliant, ming.

But the most common form of Chinese characters

involves this sort of combination of forms involving what linguists come

to call radical, radical as in root meaning.

So this part that's outlined here in pink

is basically the part, forms a part of this column of characters

you see here.

And the radical gives you some sense of the connotation.

It's a connotative part of the character's meaning.

So we have this character li, meaning strength.

Or this means hit, [CHINESE], a cave, or silk.

Mu, tree.

And then shui, water.

So we can use that as a radical, a root meaning of a form.

And we combine that with what's called a phonetic, which

gives us a clue to the pronunciation.

And during the course of the history of the Chinese language,

the pronunciation of these words has changed.

And so we'll see that in the modern pronunciations following

what's called Mandarin Chinese.

The modern Mandarin pronunciations have shifted.

So this is a character in and of itself.

Gong, which means, one of its meanings is to work.

But here in combination with the radical to form a new character,

it's not really there completely to have a connotative function.

But rather to give a clue to the pronunciation.

So when we take this phonetic, we put it here

in this particular example on the left side.

We take the character li for strength.

Put them together, and we have a new character that's pronounced gong.

This is pronounced gong, and so the character

is pronounced gung, which means result.

It's gong as in kong fu.

Gong as in gong fu.

So the accomplishment in martial arts through strength

and through discipline practice and so on.

Now if we take the character hit and combined it with gong,

we get gong, to attack.

Or if we take cave and we put cave on top of gong,

we get empty or hollow.

For a couple of meanings.

But now it's pronounced in Mandarin Chinese, kong or kung.

The pronunciation has shifted.

And then we have silk, perhaps thinking of dyed red silk.

And so you get the character meaning red, hong.

And now the pronunciation is even further removed from gong.

Adding a tree, we get a gung, which is a long pole

to carry goods on it, hanging from the pole.

And then we have water, which in this particular form

on the left side turns into three dots.

And we have jiang.

And this means river.

So but this is basically 80% to 85% of the Chinese writing

system, Chinese characters, are of the sort.

So they're not really in a sense pictographs.

The Chinese brush.

The way in which you write is using this

implement that we call in English the brush.