Chinese Calligraphy Can Be A Stroke Of Beauty -- Saam Exhibit Shows Writing As An Art Form

----------------------------------------------------------------- Visual arts review

"Abstraction and Expression in Chinese Calligraphy," Seattle Asian Art Museum, Volunteer Park, through March 23; 654-3100.

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To westerners, Chinese calligraphy is an inscrutable art. Revered for thousands of years by the Chinese as a high art form, it was (and still is) practiced not only by religious men and scholars but aristocrats and poets. Apprentices spent lifetimes perfecting their calligraphy, which is essentially the art of handwriting, and great masters from the 15th and 16th centuries are still admired and discussed.

There is nothing quite like it in western art. Medieval European monks made illuminated manuscripts, but the point was to make a beautiful edition of an important text, nearly always a religious one. The idea was to save the text for posterity; if it was beautiful to look at, all the better. But beauty was not the ultimate goal.

But beauty, style and personal expression are the goals of Chinese calligraphy. And a special exhibition at the Seattle Asian Art Museum makes that clear. Organized by the China Institute of America, a New York organization, the traveling exhibition of 24 scrolls is from the collection of New York collector H. Christopher Luce.

Many of the scrolls are from the 15th and 16th centuries, though one or two are from the early 20th century. Work by 22 calligraphers is included.

The idea behind the show, according to an introduction by Luce, "is to get people to think visually and forget that these characters have anything to do with written language. I want people to get beyond the surface to find the beauty in each character and follow the flow of the brush strokes, to discover the passion and playfulness of Chinese artists."

To make it easier for 20th-century Westerners to think of these scrolls as abstract art, the museum has not provided translations for the essays, poems and tracts represented by the calligraphy. This can be irritating at first since the labels hint tantalizingly at the subject matter. A particularly bold and expressive scroll by the 17th century calligrapher Fu Shan, for instance, is described as a "paen to drinking" and we are told that Fu "believed that after drinking, his calligraphy became powerful and strange." Fu must have been a 17th century Jackson Pollock, his art oiled by spirits of the alcoholic kind.

But not having translations also forces the viewer to look at these scrolls as abstract art. And the most striking feature of this serene and surprisingly captivating show is how wildly different the scrolls are from one another. From the tidy, half-inch high, precise letters of some scrolls, to the large, boisterous, loopy lettering of others, it's easy to think of Chinese calligraphy as a kind of pen and ink jazz.

Like western jazz musicians, Chinese calligraphers spend years learning the fundamentals of their art, the rules of harmony, chords and syncopation, before finding their own voice through improvisation and individual style.

Kan Youwei, who died in 1927, made big, elegant, dramatic scrolls that suggest the sleek power of sculptures by Henry Moore or Constantin Brancusi. Li Juan, an 18th century artist, is known for the humor and playfulness in his characters, which go from fat and blobby to linguini-thin in one energetic stroke. It's easy to look at his work as a kind of cartoon of leaping, rolling, dancing characters. He may be writing about something deadly dull, but the calligraphy suggests a whimsical children's tale or the story of a lusty bacchanal.

The museum notes correctly that numerous 20th century artists from Henry Moore, Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline have been influenced by the abstract expressiveness of calligraphy. Given the tedious ubiquity of digital lettering on computer screens and printouts today, perhaps the more convention-challenging 21st century artists also will find inspiration in calligraphy.