By Will Boyd, PhD
The stroke is most appreciated when it contains emptiness and is transparent, a dry brush leads the imagination, but does not say what the character is in substance.Void is a fertile whiteness, a field of possibilities, like the xuan paper spread before the artist.
The black, the un-illiminated, the recessive and gravitating is the mass inside the whiteness.
Heaven’s harmony is found in white unity, and the nature of self and man’s inner contradiction is found in the division and the form of this perfect universal by black marks. Void, to the calligrapher, is where the art resides, and the best knowledge of art is how and where to leave it.
Like the sliding voice of an erhu, or the raspy flare of the guqin, the brushwork ties its structure together by accidental tinsels of forgotten motion: not loopy and un-differentiated, like western handwriting, but skeletal and organic, like the orchid flower that hangs to the stalk by a tiny thread.
The calligraphy strokes are quick, not hoping for a second chance, which would make it perfect (instead, this going back to fix things is the cardinal taboo in calligraphy). It is stark black on white, like the time passed in life, in action, doing what can never be undone.
There are no second chances, and life’s fragile beauty and tragedy are all summed up in the unwritten philosophy behind brush and ink.
Facing the East 