Calligraphy and Power in Contemporary Chinese Society 1st Edition by Yuehping Yen ISBN 9781134370610 113437061X

1 Dances with power Public calligraphy and its social effects

Public calligraphy

Public calligraphy as an instrument of propaganda

Public calligraphy as public display of loyalty and revolutionary zeal

Public calligraphy as political barometer

Tizi as tokens indicative of guanxi

Public inscription as publicity booster

Calligraphy as a ladder for social climbing

Art or not: a matter of social manipulation

Art or non-art: a question to the native Chinese

The power brush

2 Becoming a person through wen

Mingong: anything that city people are not

Strong as bull; greedy as pig

They cheat; they breed

Peasant hats or trendy hats?

Unreliable botchers; affordable interior designers

The notion of wenhua

Contemporary usage of the term wenhua

Wenhua: transformed by writing

Becoming a person through wen

Ascending the tower of deep knowledge

The deep knowledge of written characters

Extrapolating a theological version of absolute knowledge

3 Handwriting and personhood

Fascination with handwriting

Pleasing everyone: practising handwriting as a form of work in the office

Fountain-pen shufa as an emerging art form

Practising brush calligraphy by writing big-character posters

Fascination examined

Handwriting and personhood

Handwriting as a secondary face

Handwriting: both revealing and deceptive

Calligraphy or handwriting as the extension ofthe body-person

The physiognomy of calligraphy

Revealing bodily forms

4 Body-person engineering through ink and brush Brush techniques and calligraphic composition

Anthropological literature on personhood andembodiment

Brush techniques

The tools of the art: brush and ink

Life, force and rhythmic movement of brush strokes

Three characteristics of force in brush techniques

Being together in inked traces

The composition of calligraphy

Non-geometrical form and cultural evaluation

Compositional principles of individual characters

Theme and variation

Rule of anti-rules: writing as an impromptu sequence of action and reaction

Calligraphic composition of the whole work

The moral brush

5 Brush work Alternative bodybuilding

Practising calligraphy: the cultivation of a good bodyand a sound mind

The kinetic aspect of writing with brush and ink

Practising calligraphy to cultivate and strengthen the body-person

The purification of senses and the calming of the body-person

The rectification of the moral character

The learning process magnified

Exact copying — tracing (mo)

Free copying (lin)

What is copied?

Sloughing the ghost in the self

The embodied brush and the production of subjectivity

Enacting discipline

The social propeller behind the disciplining brush

The gender aspect

Art of the body and art as embodiment

Calligraphic paradox as the locus of social manipulation

Calligraphic fashion

6 Ideograms and knowledge

Written characters as the base of knowledge?

Goody’s literacy thesis

Bloch’s formulation of ideograms as a response to Goody’s thesis

Implication of ideographic writing

The ideogram myth

The modern script reform in China and its implicationfor Bloch’s thesis

A brief history of script reform

Characters new and old: sources of simplified characters

Cang fie was the masses and the masses are Cang fie

Popular conception on the script reform in contemporary China

Implication of the script reform for Bloch’s literacy thesis

Linguistic myth turned into social reality

Telltale written forms: solving character puzzles

Genesis in the form of written characters

Ideograms: inexhaustible fuel for knowledge production

7 Characters reloaded1

Re-inventing calligraphy: characters are still good to think with

The ever-evolving relationship with power

Professional calligraphy medallists

Calligraphic enterprises in the institutionalized ‘calligraphy world’

The re-enchantment of calligraphy — the agency of calligraphy

From the fingertip back to the moon

The agency of calligraphy

Notes

Introduction: The abode of calligraphic inscriptions

1 Dances with power: Public calligraphy and its social effects

2 Becoming a person through wen

3 Handwriting and personhood

4 Body-person engineering through ink and brush: Brush techniques and calligraphic composition

5 Brush work: Alternative bodybuilding

6 Ideograms and knowledge

7 Characters reloaded

Bibliography

List of Chinese characters for terms used in the text

Index