2025 Academic Year Short Course Review 「Give Form to Myriad Things: Calligraphy」

From 17 March to 28 March 2025, students from the King's Foundation School of Traditional Arts China Centre completed a two-week course on "Give Form to Myriad Things:Cal-ligraphy" under the guidance of Tutor Jia Qin, a researcher at the The China Institute for Visual Studies at the China Academy of Art, and Tutor Lu Dadong, a professor at the China Academy of Art.

The Calligraphy is a tradition of writing, behind which is its lettering system; and behind the lettering system, there is the formation and historical evolution of the Chinese characters.

Chinese calligraphy consists of two key elements: " words" and "writing" The " word" includes the scripts of the writing history as well as the information about writing of the art history. And the "writing" is based on the learning experience passed down from teachers to students.

In a series of lectures, tutor Jia Qin discussed the spiritual lineage of traditional Chinese "Tu Xue" focusing on the Shuo Wen Jie Zi (Expla-nation of Characters in Chinese).

The lectures traced back to the hieroglyphic structure of | Ching and its diagrams, as well as the origins of the diagrams in Zhoubi Su-anjing and other literature.

The tutor cross-referenced two concepts: the "Zhen Wen", which was the origin of writing to communicate all things in the universe, and the "Fu Mo", which has become the a literature (from Zhuangzi). Both "Zhen Wen" and "Fu Mo" are matter of documentation and ideology.The two are intertwined, becoming the driving force behind the thinking of sages.

The main topics introduced by Tutor Lu Dadong include: literacy of words, types of characters, analysis of writing styles, correction of writing postures, and practice of using the body in writing.