So it was a good day to head down to the Hong Kong Central library exhibition hall and see the Jiazai Society of Calligraphy 30th Anniversary exhibition.
My friend May from tai chi class had helped organise the exhibition and kindly gave me a guided tour.
She had also written the exhibition catalog and many of the exhibition notes.
The exhibition is an annual (or biannual) event that showcases works done by the society members over the previous year.
The exhibition was pretty large with 330 works with a good variety of examples of the four main styles of chinese calligraphy - seal script, clerical script, cursive and semi-cursive (wiki link). Mainly on paper but also on fans and bamboo.
The writings seemed to be mainly famous poems, proverbs, quotations or buddhist sutras.
May had 3 works in the exhibition. The first was the poem 'A farmhouse on the Wei River' by Wang Wei. (see next post). I imagine it takes many attempts to get the brushwork just right, so doing calligraphy its probably a good way to become familiar with (and meditate on ) your favorite poems.
May's second work is a proverb about how to live a long healthy life.
One fun aspect of calligraphy is fitting the brushwork to the content. In this text the basic theme is moderation and not taking things too seriously. Which suits the calligraphy which was done freely all in one go.
The third work was some poems on fans.
I like calligraphy and enjoyed the exhibition very much. Although Im sure I'd enjoy it even more if I wasn't illiterate.
I know a few characters so I can often get a sense of the what the text is about ("something, river, field, house, something, something, cow sheep something...").
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| Heart Sutra |
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| Heart Sutra |
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| Heart Sutra |
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