Calligrapher Explores Beauty in Writing

He Bin and I have been friends for years. He is good-natured, witty, and cheerful with a good sense of humor. Our chats often cover a great variety of things in the world. He Bin has penchant for paintings and calligraphic works. In his fifties now, he has just had a new hobby for collecting jades and other precious stones. I can find jades in his pockets at any time. He says that by carrying these jades with him, he is grooming these precious stones. His office looks like a variety store where heaps of things pile up in a great mess.

But He Bin’s biggest penchant is for calligraphy, as testified both by his membership of China Calligraphers Association and by the Chinese characters he wrote on the stones which found their ways into his collection and into his office.

And he has been at calligraphy for more than four decades. His collection of paintings and calligraphic works and his tireless pursuit of perfection in his calligraphy prove his dedication. Calligraphy requires quiet lifelong dedication.

He Bin’s specialty in calligraphy is the clerical script, a dignified style that evolved out of the seal script and took initial shape in the Qin Dynasty (221-207BC) and took its present name in the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-225AD). A major transformation in the evolution of the written Chinese, the clerical script requires modern calligraphers to rediscover its ancient majesty and simplicity. In order to make his clerical script writing more vivid, He Bin has explored the ancient clerical scripts and introduced elements of seal script into his penmanship.

The clerical script took shape about 2,000 years ago and experienced a renaissance in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) when studies of ancient inscriptions on bronze artifacts and seals and text criticism of ancient canon became prominent scholastic disciplines. During this period of time, large quantities of ancient masterpieces in this script were put together and based on innovative studies and individual idiosyncrasies, new styles of the script were created. The calligraphers’ pursuit opened up a lot of possibilities in the elegant script and therefore created a second peak time of this specific script in the history of Chinese calligraphy.

What He Bin has done over the past four decades and more is exploring the possibilities opened up by the scholars of the Qing Dynasty and studying how to add something modern and personal to the script.

One touch he has added to his inscriptions in this script is the post-writing ornament. His idea is that creativity in calligraphy does not end with hand-writing. A work of calligraphic art needs to be displayed and how it is mounted on another piece of paper is something worth further exploring. There may be a great variety of ways to wrap up an inscription so that it can be displayed artistically and viewed in the desirable way. In fact, He Bin believes display is a very important aspect of creative calligraphy.

One of the private seals he carved for himself reads “Two-Forgets Studio”, pointing to an ideal situation in which he forgets both himself and the world. He says he really enjoys calligraphy. While writing, he lets his mind going all the ways through contrasts of white and black, existence and non-existence, dream and reality, light and shade, fast motion and motionlessness. He calls his studio “Hearing Clouds”. Last year, he moved to a new apartment and to his great pleasure, found that a small hill beyond the residential building is called “Playing with Clouds”.