Calligrapher enjoys brush with greatness

What makes a calligrapher one of the best of all time? The answer can be found in Weidu Fu, a rhyme-prose composed by Zuo Si, a man of letters whose life spanned the third and fourth centuries. He wrote: "Accumulate in the way the clouds gather, and release as smoothly as the rain drops."

The description properly summarizes the way Chen Hailiang presents his calligraphic momentum on paper in a gentle, relaxed manner. It has led to the 55-year-old being considered one of the leading calligraphers of his generation.

Chen has won many accolades, including several Lanting Awards, the highest prize in the field, organized by the China Calligraphers Association.

"Still, I have room to achieve maturity, even at my age," he said at the opening of his one-man exhibition, Artistry of Original Strokes, running at the National Art Museum of China through Tuesday.

On show are more than 90 pieces of work, navigating Chen's various scripts, including those on the oracle bones, recognized as the earliest form of Chinese written characters.

There is prose, self-composed poems and couplets, as well as copies of famed, historical calligraphic masterpieces, for example, the Hanshi Tie written by Su Shi, a great poet and essayist of the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127).

The sizes vary from dozens of centimeters to over 3 meters from ceiling to floor.

It offers a glimpse of Chen's endeavors with different styles of calligraphy and his mastery of the cursive script (caoshu), with its highly expressive semiabstract style.

Growing up in the southern part of the country, Chen has lived in the north for years. He received a master's degree in calligraphy at the China National Academy of Arts and now teaches there.

He says the many years spent in Beijing and the expansive north "have rendered to his strokes the depths of history and a sense of extensiveness".

His accomplishments are grounded in years of hard work. "If someone truly wants to be a professional in the field," Chen says, "they should at least practice eight hours a day. I sometimes practice much longer than that, and for the rest of the day, I write and read about calligraphy, or articles on the relationship between calligraphy and other forms of Chinese art."

Liu Heng, a noted scholar of the China Calligraphers Association, says the solid discipline of calligraphy has enabled Chen to achieve a technical brilliance, which is visible in his copies of the calligraphic masterpieces on show, but he is far from being content with copying the styles of those great artists, and exhibiting them everywhere.

"He has been trying to establish his own style, and he has done it. The exhibition shows that process of artistic maturity," Liu says.

Wu Weishan, director of National Art Museum of China, says that behind Chen's work is his commitment to being a thinker and trailblazer in the realm of calligraphy."Between the strokes, he is reaching out to the core of traditional culture, and looking for a path to the future of the craft."