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Title: Calligraphy - a Vital Art Form in China Today
Review: "Brushed Voices" is the beautifully-printed catalog of an exhibition of calligraphy at Columbia University by some two dozen living Chinese artists. The author, a calligrapher and scholar of art himself, selected works of art that demonstrate important trends in calligraphy, such as "non-character calligraphy," where calligraphers make up non-existent characters, which they write as elegantly and seriously as real characters, as a kind of comment on the difficult and sometimes nonsensical nature of traditional Chinese learning, and "pictorial calligraphy," where artists make calligraphy by "painting" characters in splashy, washy strokes that are composed like the elements of a picture. The catalog contains insightful discussions of the artists' ideas and use of the brush, as well as biographical information about each artist. This is the only book in English to open a window onto the flourishing world of calligraphy in China today.
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