Perseverance with Artistic Exploration

Instinct of Rationality
In my youth, I tended to think in a way of logic and reasoning. Although my scores of humanities were higher than those of scientific disciplines, I was quite interested in induction and deduction of mathematics.
When I grew up, my thinking had more and more instinctive and intuitive elements. Actually instincts and intuition are not absolutely contradictory to logic thinking. A good summary of the relation between them is "rational instinct". According to this, instinct is the surface of rationality; while for rationality; instinct is a latent and immanent supplement. These two are inseparable and occur in the process of thinking and are united in such process.

Calligraphy is an art with strong intuition
Calligraphy relies heavily on visual intuition. In my childhood, the seed of love for calligraphy had begun to grow in my heart. I laid the foundation for it in the boyhood and finally started artistic creation in the adulthood.
Meanwhile I also wrote calligraphic and painting reviews and composed poetry and ci. However, my job was an arts editor and a lot of social activities also occupied the rest of my precious time. As to the losses and gains from these things, I don't want to measure with a scale, nor is it necessary.
In fact, I felt more and more weight of instinct in artistic judgement and truth judgement as well.
This may be a reason for my love of calligraphy, or in another word, one result of my fondness of calligraphy. The reason is that calligraphy is an art which emphasizes passion and instinct. If one is immersed into it for a long time, his consciousness will be influenced.
Thus when I am creating artistic works, it also changes and models my personality. The more I pursue it, the more I feel the unity of truth, goodness and beauty in life and art, in art and humanity.
The artistic circle once discussed heatedly about whether artistic practice is a social practice and whether the process of creation can transform an artist's soul. Now I shall give a positive answer. Only with a soul of truth, goodness and beauty will a man pursue arts and will he find truth, goodness and beauty in life.

Simplicity conceives variety and richness tends to unity
In the elements of calligraphy, the most important one in my opinion is line. Line is most simple and the richest. Just because of its simplicity, it is very precious and difficult to achieve its richness. Richness does not mean disorder and simplicity is not equal to shallowness. Simplicity conceives variety and richness leads to unity.
Line describes everything in the world. The richness of line comes from the world as well as exemplifies the intent, vigor, sentiment and pleasure of the artist.
Compared with the structures of Chinese characters, line is a more basic, immanent and active element.
We have done a lot of research of the differences between the structures of the great calligraphers in the Chinese history, but what we did about the differences between the lines of their works is very little. Those who are really great calligrapher are first of all founders and creators of the unique beauty of lines.
Total harmony and fine grasp of calligraphic works all depend on various connected or disconnected, visible or invisible lines. The history of the development of calligraphy must contain the history of the development of lines.
From seal characters to official scripts, from official scripts to regular scripts, from regular scripts to running scripts, every evolution marks a new period of richness of Chinese calligraphy, until the cursive hands which culminates calligraphic art.
The characteristics of the ancient masters are very reamrkable and creative. It is easy to learn the structures of them , but it is difficult to learn their spirit. One important reason is that line is the vital means and bridge or even the basis of the transformation from surface to essence.

Cherish unique styles
The expressiveness of calligraphic works is not only in conflict with the personal tendency of its creator, but also the latter is the prerequisite of the former. The reason is simple: calligraphic works demonstrate the spirit of the artist, so unique personality is essential in creation.
My consistent belief is that we cannot push intentionally the formation of the common characteristics of time. Actually the full freedom of the artists' uniqueness forms the common characteristics of our time.
We should encourage and cherish unique styles. There is also dialectics: no uniqueness, no commonness.
Tradition and creation are a pair of contradictions existing in a unity. Nobody can absolutely get away from either side of contradictions. Talented artists are skillful in the transformation from tradition to creation, find his position in arts and reality, and form his unique style.

Element of Modernity
This contains some element of what we often mentioned modernity. Modernity is the reflection of artists' intent, sentiment, and taste in calligraphy. Modernity is not isolated from tradition.
In calligraphy, due to the continuation of writings, the concepts of aesthetics change comparatively slowly and excellent tradition spans from the past, the present, and the future. If we try to separate tradition and creation absolutely, an intentional misunderstanding of aesthetics will occur and a gap between history and reality will emerge.
Of course, there are essential differences between modernity and tradition. Even arts with such a log history like calligraphy should not exclude modernity.
Calligraphy must draw nutrition form the aesthetic consciousness of the contemporary generation and draw on it. The phenomenon that the Abstract School has drawn much attention from contemporary calligraphers is a factual existence and inevitable trend. However, drawing on from the Abstract School is just a means of expressing modernity and it should not be restricted in one model.
The combination of tradition and modernity in calligraphy is a general goal. The proportion of the two elements can not be decided accurately like chemical elements. The formation of schools and the expression of individuality should be free for development.
In my calligraphic works, some think there are modern elements in tradition. This is, of course, what I will be glad to hear, as well as a goal of my pursuit.
In what angles are these two elements combined and to what extent are they combined? For critics, they may get the conclusion after some logical analysis, but for me it is solely dependent on instinct. This instinct is not isolated from rationality, nor emerge from nothing. It is formed from the long-time and comprehensive accumulation of my personality, tendency and skills.
In the concrete process of creation, the best stage is: your heart does not know the movement of your hands and your hands do not move with the consciousness of your mind. This is the highest degree of accomplishment. However, even when I reached this degree, I would not stop. Because however high the accomplishment is, an artist should not stop his exploration. If my heart still beat, I would not draw a full stop to the pursuit.
How to enrich the instinctual thinking in creation? I think it should be regarded as an exploration. To judge whether an artist is still active, the best way is to see if he has the courage to explore and the ability to transform his excellent artistic sense into works.

One's own enemy
In the contemporary time, calligraphic art is at a golden age. Calligraphy has become one of the favorite arts of people. Artists find the more the society is modernized, the more they are urged to return to simplicity and to create from tradition.
In the present time, only if the relation between tradition and creation is various and complementary, then can we achieve a balance between them and keep a unity of multiple elements.
For calligraphy itself, multiplicity means real richness and harmony. As to individual calligraphers, unity of styles should tolerate rather than exclude different directions of exploration. Only if we have different directions of exploration, then is unified style avoided to be monotone.
It is needless to say that the multiplicity, variety and multiple directions all center around truth, goodness and beauty.
One thing worthy of note is: on one hand, the present time brings a lot of good opportunities to the prosperity of calligraphy; on the other, the internal and external environment is quite different from the previous times. While calligraphy has become a favorite form of art for people, it also makes some calligraphers at unrest. The solemn, elegant and simple air in ancient works is gone and correspondingly some vain and ostentatious aspects are shown.
The fashion of "beautification" has infested the circle of calligraphy: either to "beautify" calligraphy or to "beautify" other things with calligraphy. Such "beautification" may weaken artists' wish to create in this noisy environment and has aroused concerns from those artists and critics with vision.
My puzzles in creation are not separated from the influences of the status quo of the contemporary calligraphic circle either. The good and bad factors in this circle definitely have echoes from the calligraphers of my generation.
Both the whole circle and individuals must realize that in the progress of our artistic career, the real "enemy" is always ourselves and to overcome that may be a hard process.

Thoughts on ancient masters' regrets on their early works
Huang Tingjian, a great writer and calligrapher of cursive hands in Song Dynasty, wrote in " Written after Reading of Chu Suiliang's Imitation of Wang Xizhi's Work", "When I was in the South of Guizhou, I did not feel that my writing was very weak. When I was moved to Rongzhou, I found out my writings were terribly bad. Only three or four characters from ten were not that bad. Then I knew the golden truth of ancient wise people, but it's very difficult to find another person who could share such feeling with me."
According to his words, he arrived Guizhou in 1095 and went to the south in 1096 or 1097. By that time, he was already 52 or 53 years old and had come to a mature period in terms of artistic achievement. However, when he went to Rongzhou, he still re-examined his writings as "weak" and "terribly bad".
Then I thought about the ancient people's regrets on writings in their youth. What a precious quality of self-examination and self-criticism. It is not enough to just regret on works in youth, but also works in their old ages. Even the three or four "not that bad" characters in Huang Tingjian's view are already very good.
So, it is difficult to find exact words in poetry and ci and it's more difficult to write a perfect essay. Only after arduous exploration and exercise can one make some accomplishment and write excellent essays. However, only a few are "not that bad" in Huang Tingjian's many works.
When I stop here, I feel more deeply that life is so short and time is so precious, so we should take up our responsibility for the healthy development of calligraphic art in our time.

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