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This work writes out a five-character quatrain:

A light touch of willow wind,
then borrowing half a fence of red.
The poem leans into mist and rain,
and blends spring into a little cup.

In terms of poetic feeling, it is about spring. But not a grand spring, not the kind of spring with flowers filling the eye and spreading everywhere. It is a little light wind, a little willow mood, a little red reflection on the water, a little wine-like feeling in mist and rain. Its strength lies in smallness. It is so small that spring becomes one little cup, so small that redness is only half a pole, so small that one word, “touch,” can lift the wind out of the air. If a poem like this were written in characters too proper, too full, too upright, the poem would be crushed. Wang Wei’s（王为） running script does not turn it into a “standard work.” He writes it as a small piece with touch, playfulness, and breath.

This calligraphy cannot be judged only by whether it is “beautiful.” It is more like a small scene. The paper is not large. The number of characters is small. The movement of the lines slopes downward. The ink has changes in weight and lightness. Several characters are deliberately enlarged, pressed heavier, and opened out, like a few stones dropped into spring water. As a whole, the work does not pursue the evenness of official-style calligraphy, nor does it seek the shock of large characters in an exhibition hall. Its path is closer to a literati small piece. It writes the poem while also writing emotion. It keeps the frame of running script while allowing a few characters to step out and “perform.” If this “performance” goes too far, it becomes vulgar. If it is too little, the work becomes flat. The success and failure of this piece both lie on that fine line.

It Does Not Aim to Make Every Character Proper; It Lets a Few Characters Catch the Eye

Looking at this piece, what first jumps out is not neatness, but several striking characters. For example, “spring”（春）, “borrow”（借）, “half”（半）, and “cup”（盅）, as well as “mist”（烟） and “blend”（调）, are all deliberately exaggerated. They do not sit in even boxes like ordinary running-script characters, with similar size and weight. Some suddenly open out. Some suddenly grow heavier. Some are drawn very small. Some extend their force outward. This method is risky, but it also shows the writer’s courage most clearly.

The character “spring”（春） is especially interesting. In the poem, this character gathers the whole piece together, so it naturally carries weight. The last line is “and blends spring into a little cup”（调成春一盅）. If “spring”（春） were written flatly, the whole poem would lose a breath. In this work, “spring”（春） is written with openness. Its center of gravity presses downward. The upper part has a sense of spreading. The lower part does not become stiff. It feels like the instant when spring has just been blended into being. It is not the upright, proper “spring”（春） of regular script. It has a little sway, even a little intoxication. Together with “a little cup”（一盅）, it gives us spring color inside a wine cup.

The character “borrow”（借） is also worth looking at. The line “then borrowing half a fence of red”（再借半篙红） already contains an action. It is not possession. It is not seizure. It is borrowing. If this character were written too stiffly, the lightness in the poem would be lost. In the work, the person radical on the left of “borrow”（借） feels lively, while the right side is opened more fully. The brush movement gives the sense of a hand reaching out for the moment. It does not stand neatly in place. It is more like a hand stretched toward wind, toward water, toward spring, borrowing a little redness from them. The slight exaggeration of this character brings out the action inside “borrow”（借） just right.

The character “half”（半） is even more subtle. It is a character that can easily be written flat. Its structure is simple and its strokes are few. If handled badly, it looks like bookkeeping. But in this work, “half”（半） is enlarged and made heavier, and there is clear tension between its horizontal and vertical forces. It looks like a pole standing in the water, and also like a little red reflection being lifted from the water. In the poem, “half a fence of red”（半篙红） does not mean one half in the mathematical sense. It suggests a quiet measure: not full, not complete, not exhausted, and so it leaves aftertaste. The exaggerated form makes “half”（半） no longer merely a number word. It becomes one of the centers of the picture.

There is also the character “cup”（盅）. It comes at the end of the poem and serves as the landing point. It is not “cup” in the general sense of bei（杯）, nor is it a “pot”（壶）. It is a zhong（盅）. A zhong（盅） is small. It has a folk flavor, a wine-drinking flavor, and also a little leisure of the old literati. In the work, this character is written with weight, as if it finally gathers the spring color into a vessel. Before it, wind, willow, red, mist, and rain have all dispersed. In the end, everything is held by this one “cup”（盅）. The heaviness in the character form matches the poem’s act of gathering.

The character structure in this work does not belong to the path of “every character finely strict.” It belongs to the path of “main and supporting roles.” It lets several key characters step forward while the others serve as accompaniment. This suits a small piece very well. What a small piece most fears is equal force everywhere. Equal force may look proper, but it has no sound. The sound of Wang Wei’s（王为） calligraphy comes from this very unevenness.

The most valuable thing about this work is that the calligraphy is not separated from the poem. In many calligraphic works that write ancient poems, the poem is only content, while the characters are only form. No matter how beautifully the writer writes, he has merely copied out a poem. Wang Wei’s（王为） piece is different. It lets the viewer feel that the shapes of the characters are speaking for the poem.

“A light touch of willow wind”（轻拈杨柳风） means the opening cannot be too heavy. There is dark ink, but the brush movement is not clumsy. “Then borrowing half a fence of red”（再借半篙红） means “borrow”（借） and “half”（半） must come forward. They need action and color. “The poem leans into mist and rain”（诗意就烟雨） means “mist”（烟） needs cursive spirit, emptiness, and a sense of dispersal. “And blends spring into a little cup”（调成春一盅） means “spring”（春） and “cup”（盅） need closure, wine feeling, and the sense of a small cup of spring resting in the palm. This is “writing meaning through calligraphy.” It does not simply explain the poem. It lets the size, weight, speed, and emptiness of the characters take part in the poem’s meaning. Only a work like this has something to read. The reader does not only read the poem. The reader also reads how the writer understands the poem.

The poem itself is also suited to calligraphy. It has verbs, color, weather, and an object. The four verbs—“touch”（拈）, “borrow”（借）, “lean into”（就）, and “blend”（调）—make spring into something that can be handled and mixed. Spring does not simply arrive from nature. It is as if the poet has brought it out by hand. A poem with this kind of tactile feeling is especially suited to running script. Running script itself is the motion of the hand. So the hand in the poem and the hand in the writing come together.

It Has the Bones of Running Script and the Leap of Cursive Script

In terms of brushwork, the basic ground of this work is running script. The opening strokes, closing strokes, and turns mostly remain within the range of running script. It is not wild cursive, nor is it great cursive. Though there are links between characters, the forms are not fully broken apart. The reader can still recognize the text. This is the basic condition for it to stand as a small calligraphic piece of poetry.

But the writer is not satisfied with “making it clear.” He adds cursive spirit into the running script. The most obvious case is the character “mist”（烟）. This character is written in a more cursive way. The line is quicker, the form simpler, and it forms a contrast with the steadier running script around it. This is a crucial treatment. The line is “The poem leans into mist and rain”（诗意就烟雨）. The character “mist”（烟） itself should not be written too solidly. If mist is made solid, it is no longer mist. It should float. It should disperse. It should seem visible and yet impossible to grasp. Writing “mist”（烟） in cursive script brings out precisely that sense of drifting and dispersing.

When a cursive character is suddenly placed inside running script, it often feels abrupt. Many people writing small pieces like to mix in cursive methods at random. The result is neither proper running script nor proper cursive script. It is only careless writing. But the “mist”（烟） in this piece does not feel out of place. The reason is that the whole work was never on a strictly orderly path to begin with. Earlier, the transformed and exaggerated shapes of “spring”（春）, “half”（半）, and “borrow”（借） had already opened up the atmosphere of the paper. So when “mist”（烟） turns cursive, it instead feels like vapor rising naturally. It is not a technique forced into the piece. It feels like a form drawn out by the poem itself.

This is one of the most important points in calligraphy: change cannot exist only for the sake of change. Change must have a poetic reason, and it must be supported by the composition. Wang Wei（王为） handles this part with feeling. He knows that “mist”（烟） cannot be written too heavily, and he also knows that the whole work needs a light, nimble point. Once the cursive spirit appears, the work immediately becomes alive.

The brushwork has another feature: the lifting and pressing are fairly clear. Where the line should be heavy, the writer dares to press. Where it should be light, he dares to release. In several large characters, the ink lines are thick and the bone strength is relatively firm. Some supporting characters are lighter, even with a little dry-brush effect. This kind of brushwork gives the paper surface rise and fall. It is not flat like a computer font. It is also not like an ordinary exercise in which every stroke tries hard to be “in place.” Some places are deliberately not fully completed. Some places deliberately go a little beyond. The interest lies exactly between going too far and not going far enough.

Of course, the problem is also here. Some strokes could close more cleanly. Some turns seem a little casual, especially in several small characters, where the line sometimes pursues speed and loses a little composure. Truly fine running script has bone even when it is fast. It does not float even when it is light. This work already has charm, but if it is to rise another level, the brushwork needs stronger inner control. This does not mean it should become more proper. It means that even in release, one should see discipline.

The Ink Is Not Complex, but It Has the Warmth of a Small Piece

The ink method in this work is not grand or dramatic. It does not have a strong clash between dry and wet brush, nor does it use large areas of swollen ink or broken ink. The overall ink tone is rather steady, with local changes in weight and lightness. This suits the poem. The poetic feeling is not storm and thunder. It is mist and rain, willow, half a pole, and a little cup of spring. What it needs is warmth and moisture, not explosion.

Several key characters are written in heavier ink, and visually they naturally become the frame. The rest are lighter, like water vapor and wind sound. This arrangement is quite fitting. In particular, if “half”（半） and “cup”（盅） were too light, they would not hold the work down. If “mist”（烟） and “rain”（雨） were too heavy, they would lose their sense of haze. The present handling has levels on the whole. It is not very complex, but it has life.

Yet from a stricter point of view, the ink method could be richer. The wetness of the whole piece and the changes of dry brush are not yet full enough. Since the poem has “mist and rain”（烟雨）, the ink could carry more water feeling. For example, between the second and third lines, there could be a finer transition between dryness and wetness, so that the atmosphere of “mist and rain”（烟雨） would be shown not only through character shape, but also through ink. The present “mist”（烟） has cursive spirit, but in ink it could be emptier and lighter, so that it truly seems to disperse from the paper surface.

The paper has a warm tone, and the ink is dark. The visual relation is quite good. The black and white do not hurt the eye, and there is an old flavor. But the border and background belong to the way the work is displayed, not to the calligraphy itself. To judge this work seriously, one should still look at the central sheet. If it is mounted in the future, a plainer treatment may be better. A background that is too strong can steal the qi of the characters. This is especially true for small pieces like this, which should not be pressed down by decoration.

The most important thing to discuss in this work is, in fact, its composition. It does not write the four lines of the poem evenly into four columns. Instead, it arranges them in about three and a half columns. The first line on the right writes “A light touch of willow wind, then borrowing”（轻拈杨柳风，再借）; the middle writes “half a pole of red; the poem leans into mist and rain”（半篙红，诗意就烟雨）; the left writes “and blends spring into a little cup”（调成春一盅）; and the signature falls further to the left. Roughly speaking, the character force moves from right to left. The movement of the lines is staggered. It is not fully aligned at the top, nor fully aligned at the bottom.

This composition has two strengths. One is that it breaks the stiffness often seen when five-character quatrains are written out. A quatrain is short, and it can easily be written as four straight vertical lines. That is certainly stable, but it can also look like a copied poem. Wang Wei（王为） has not merely copied the poem. He has “set a scene” on the paper. Several large characters are like trees. Several small characters are like wind. Space remains between the lines, and the poem has room to move. The other strength is that it gives the work a slanting force. The right side is heavier, the middle opens out, and the left side gathers. This movement matches the poem. It begins with “A light touch of willow wind”（轻拈杨柳风）, then reaches the visual color of “then borrowing half a pole of red”（再借半篙红）, then enters the haze of “The poem leans into mist and rain”（诗意就烟雨）, and finally falls into the small vessel of “and blends spring into a little cup”（调成春一盅）. The composition feels like a movement from outer scenery into inward feeling. It is not a straight narration. It slowly gathers inward.

In particular, the column “and blends spring into a little cup”（调成春一盅） is placed toward the left. Its character forms both gather and release, and it serves as the closing point. The signature moves further left and forms a slight boundary. In this way, the main text does not scatter, and the signature does not steal attention. The seal sits relatively low and anchors the lower left corner. As a whole, the composition stands.

Its weakness is that parts of the spacing feel slightly tight. This is especially true between some large characters, where the space feels a little crowded. If the original paper were a little larger, or if the middle line had been given slightly more air, the whole piece would feel more at ease. The present strength is compactness, and the present weakness is also compactness. Compactness can create charm. Too much compactness creates restraint. A small piece may be intimate, but it cannot feel stifled. Another issue is that the visual center of gravity leans slightly toward the middle-left. After several heavy characters gather there, the opening force at the upper right and the closing force at the lower left could still be pulled farther apart. If handled with greater precision, “a light touch”（轻拈） at the upper right could be lighter, “spring in a cup”（春一盅） at the lower left could be heavier, and “mist and rain”（烟雨） in the middle could be emptier. The three breaths would then become clearer. The work already has this intention, but it could go further.

From “Interesting” Toward “Full of Taste”

This running-script piece is not a grand narrative, nor does it pretend to be archaic. Its value lies in the fact that it knows what it wants to write: a small poem, spring feeling, lightness, and a little wine-like mist and rain. It does not enlarge the small poem. It does not turn spring into a slogan. It uses several exaggerated and interesting characters as the eyes of the piece. It uses the cursive “mist”（烟） to break the steadiness of running script. It uses a staggered composition to carry the wind, water, red color, rain, and spring cup inside the poem.

Of course, it is not without problems. Parts of the brushwork could be more grounded. The ink method could be richer. The composition could be looser. Some local exaggerations could be drawn back a little. But these are not signs of failure. They are questions of how the work can move further upward. If a work has no charm at all, there is no point discussing such things. Wang Wei’s（王为） calligraphy has at least made viewers willing to stop and look, willing to read the poem, and willing to follow several characters and think about how spring has been “blended into a cup.” That is already not easy.

Calligraphy most fears two things. One is technique without human warmth. The other is emotion without discipline. This work has something of both sides, but it has not fallen completely into either. It has method, but it is not stiff. It has charm, but it is not wild. It has poetic feeling, and it also has the shaping of characters. If, in the future, Wang Wei（王为） can move further inward in the thickness of his lines and the airiness of his composition, this type of small running-script piece will become more durable to look at. It may also move from being “good-looking on social media” to being “full of taste on the desk, worth returning to again and again.” That step does not depend on greater flourish. It depends on greater quietness.

From the perspective of tradition, this work does not follow the heavy path of the stele school. Nor does it follow the solemn path of Tang regular script. It is closer to the small running-cursive pieces within the model-book tradition. One can see in it some shadows of literati calligraphy: a stress on charm, temperament, and local nimbleness, rather than turning each character into a standard answer.

It is also related to the running-script line of Wang Xizhi（王羲之）. This does not mean that it looks like Preface to the Orchid Pavilion（《兰亭序》）. It means that it inherits the basic idea that “within running script there is change, and characters are born from the force around them.” The characters do not cling to square grids. They move according to the qi above, below, left, and right. It also has ties to the literati writing of Su Shi（苏轼） and Mi Fu（米芾）. Su’s characters value meaning. Mi’s characters value force. Ming and Qing small pieces add leisure and wit. If this work is placed in that tradition, it can broadly be understood as a contemporary literati-style small piece in running script.

It also carries a little of the “charm-oriented” tendency often seen in modern and contemporary calligraphy. Many calligraphers today like to exaggerate a few characters, make the composition staggered, and mix cursive methods into running script. There is nothing wrong with this direction in itself. The problem is that many people have only exaggeration, but no content; only form, but no brush strength; only expression, but no bone. Wang Wei’s（王为） piece stands a level above ordinary casual small pieces because its exaggeration is not random. It is tied to the poem.

The exaggeration of “spring”（春）, “borrow”（借）, and “half”（半） is not for display. These characters are truly the eyes of the poem. If they are brought alive, the whole poem comes alive. This is especially true of “half”（半）. As an ordinary word of measure between emptiness and fullness, it is turned into a visual support point. That shows thought.

The most outstanding strength of this calligraphy is that it is alive. The characters are alive. The movement of the lines is alive. The poetic feeling is also alive. It does not look like a heavy exhibition work. It looks more like a small piece written in a quiet moment by someone who understands both calligraphy and poetry. It has hand-feeling and a sense of presence. Especially in the environment of social media, this kind of work is easy to notice and easy to remember. It has several eye-catching characters, a clear poetic atmosphere, and a kind of charm that ordinary readers can enter.

If one were to give this work one final judgment, it would be this: it is already interesting; its next step is to become more full of taste. “Interesting” depends on inspiration, courage, and aesthetic sensitivity. Wang Wei（王为） already has these. The exaggeration of several characters, the insertion of cursive script into running script, and the echo between poetic meaning and character form all show that the writer has feeling. But “full of taste” is harder. It needs time. It needs depth in studying the old models. It needs seasoned strength inside the line. It also needs a more restrained judgment of empty space, ink color, and rhythm.

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The first impression this work gives is not one of neat order, but of movement. It is not the kind of running script in which every character has been placed with firm composure. Nor is it the kind of “full-page momentum-making” often seen in exhibition-style calligraphy in recent years. The work unfolds horizontally. The characters move in several directions. The ink shifts between fullness and dryness. Between one line and the next, there is a clear sense of breathing. Seen from a distance, the whole piece feels like a current rushing across the paper. Seen up close, many passages reveal a careful hand. And it is precisely this care that leaves, beyond the pleasure of the writing, a slight hesitation. That hesitation is part of the work’s flavor. It is also part of its problem.

The inscription includes such phrases as “before the casual writings of Shuchan Hall, in the eleventh month of the Yisi year, at Zhongzhou, Wenjing” (“书禅堂随笔之前，乙巳十一月于中州，文静”). Here, Wenjing can only be identified, on the basis of the signature, as the name used by the writer. As for the artist’s identity, life, lineage, and exact date of composition, this image alone does not allow for further claims.

The foundation of this piece clearly does not belong to the bureaucratic court style. Nor does it belong to the more regularized stele-school line. It is closer to the running-cursive system within the model-book tradition, especially to the air of the “large running script” that took shape after the Ming and Qing dynasties through the lines of Mi Fu (米芾), Wang Duo (王铎), and Fu Shan (傅山). Here, “large running script” does not mean that the characters are physically large. It means that the movement of the brush refuses to be enclosed within single characters. It values the momentum between lines. It values the sudden release of force at turns. It also values the movement of ink from fullness into dryness and roughness. Wenjing’s (work comes from this direction. It does not want to be a quiet piece of writing. It wants to push out a breath of energy.

Yet it is not purely Wang Duo’s kind of forceful twisting and turning. Wang Duo’s running-cursive often carries a dangerous strength. The characters seem to be pushed along by a hidden force. The vertical links are heavy, and the tilting is severe. Wenjing’s piece is not so fierce. Its lines are softer. Its structures are looser. The spaces between the columns are more open. What it seeks is a state of being “scattered but still connected.” This direction is attractive, and it is also difficult. It is attractive because it can easily appear learned and refined. It is difficult because, once the breath loosens, the bones may grow weak.

In terms of character structure, the strength of this work lies in its refusal to cling rigidly to fixed forms. Many characters are handled with slanting postures, and their centers of gravity do not always sit in the middle. In several lines on the right, for example, the characters often tilt toward the lower left or lower right, creating a slightly unstable movement. This instability is not a mistake. On the contrary, it is part of the life of running script. What running script fears is characters standing like soldiers at attention. If the characters are too upright, the breath breaks. Wenjing clearly understands this. In many places, the characters are not written to full closure. Instead, space is left between the strokes. Once the inner space of a character opens up, the movement of the line comes alive.

The problem lies here as well. In some characters, the structure loosens too quickly, and the closing force is not enough. Running script may be scattered, but it cannot be scattered without bones. A character may lean, but the lean must have inner support. The old saying speaks of “slant and uprightness giving life to one another” (“欹正相生”). The point is not simply slanting. The point is whether, after slanting, the character can still return to balance. Some characters in Wenjing’s (work slant with taste, but the force of recovery is weak. This is especially visible after several long strokes in the middle section. The following stroke does not always press down in time, so the character begins to float a little. This floating is not ease. It shows that the control under the brush has not yet fully settled.

Now consider the brushwork. The work uses both centered and side brush techniques. The thick strokes are not clumsy, and the thin strokes can still show sharpness. Many vertical strokes, long left-falling strokes, and finishing right-falling strokes carry clear changes of lifting and pressing. This shows that the writer is not using a hard-pen way of thinking to write with a brush. The writer knows that the line of a brush is formed through pressure, speed, and turning. More worth noticing are the dry strokes. The work contains many passages of flying white and rough movement, especially in several long lines. The ink moves from wet to dry, and the splitting of the brush hairs remains visible. This gives the work a sense of time. The ink has not simply been applied to the paper all at once. It has traveled across the paper.

The handling of ink is one of the most interesting parts of the work. Where the ink is rich, it must be able to press down. Where the ink is dry, the brush intention must still be visible. A good work is not afraid of dryness. It is afraid of dryness without brushwork. Most of the dry strokes in Wenjing’s (piece still keep their direction. They are not mere dry brushing. The advantage is that the work has layers of roughness and moisture. The lines on the right are relatively dark. The middle gradually moves into dryness and roughness. The inscription on the left turns lighter again. In this way, the whole piece does not become black from beginning to end, and it does not rely solely on line shape. Ink color itself participates in the rhythm of the calligraphic expression.

In good running-cursive work, ink does not become wet or dry at random. It advances together with the composition. Where the writing should be heavy, light, dry, or wet, it should serve the opening, development, turning, and closing of the whole piece. The rhythm of ink in this work could be more refined. In some places, Wenjing’s ink changes very naturally. In other places, however, the dryness seems to come simply because the brush has run low on ink, rather than because the composition requires dryness there. There are local shifts in ink tone, but the overall planning of ink is not yet strong enough. The difference is subtle, but a practiced eye can see it at once. One is a state of writing. The other is artistic management.

In composition, the work takes the form of a horizontal scroll, with the main text spreading from right to left. It does not arrange each column too neatly. Instead, it lets the spacing between lines and characters fall into a natural irregularity. This is the right choice. Horizontal running script most fears being laid out like rigid vertical typesetting. If it is too even, the breath disappears. Wenjing allows changes of density between the lines. The right side is relatively dense. The middle opens out more. The inscription on the left forms a kind of closure. Seen as a whole, the work has opening and closing, blank space, and visual movement.

The strongest point in the work is the vertical flow in several lines in the middle. There, the sizes of the characters change clearly. The lines move between thickness and thinness. Several long strokes lift the movement of the columns. In particular, the final strokes of some characters pull downward, creating a falling force from top to bottom. This falling force gives the work a true sense of “running.” It is not just a set of separate characters pasted together. In other words, it does not look like a copying exercise. It looks like a work written in the moment.

Seen from the composition, the main text on the right is relatively heavy, the middle carries stronger momentum, but the closing on the left is slightly light. The inscription could have served as the “button” of the whole piece, but here it feels somewhat weak. Its relation to the main text is not fully locked in. An inscription is not simply a name added after the main text has been written. It is the last breath of the entire work. If the inscription here were steadier, shorter, and set slightly farther inward, the whole piece would feel tighter. As it stands, it opens out a little too much, weakening the force of the left-side ending.

As for inheritance, Wenjing’s) work clearly does not follow the small running-script line of the Two Wangs. The Two Wangs (二王) value restraint, subtlety, and an even balance of bone and flesh. Their strength lies in delicate linking threads and inner changes within the characters. Wenjing’s direction is closer to the large-format running-cursive taste that developed from the Ming and Qing periods onward. It values force, ink, and breath. It has some relation to Mi Fu (米芾). Mi Fu’s writing is prized for its slanting postures and sweeping brushwork, and for sudden changes in lifting and pressing. In some of Wenjing’s side-brush strokes and horizontal sweeps, this influence can be seen. But Wenjing does not have Mi Fu’s sharp “brushing” quality, nor the almost obsessive structural control inside Mi Fu’s characters. What Wenjing borrows is Mi Fu’s posture, not Mi Fu’s bone method.

The relation to Wang Duo is also worth mentioning. Wang Duo’s running-cursive values continuity, swollen ink, and strong vertical force. Wenjing’s work has something of the expansive atmosphere of Wang Duo’s line, but it does not have Wang Duo’s step-by-step pressure. Wang Duo’s characters often seem to press toward the viewer. Wenjing’s characters are more like a wind suddenly rising during a walk. This difference matters. Wenjing is not fierce, not hard, and does not win through danger or strangeness. This is its gentleness. It is also why it can seem weak.

Compared with some contemporary calligraphers, the advantage of Wenjing’s work is that it is not overly exhibitionized. In recent years, many running-cursive works like to pile up large characters, dense ink, and visual shock. From a distance they look powerful. Up close, the lines are often hollow. Wenjing’s piece does not take that route. Its lines still want to speak of writing. They allow the brush to move slowly across the paper. They preserve turns and pauses. This is rare. It is not pure design, and it is not pure posture.

Compared with truly mature contemporary masters of running-cursive, however, the line quality of this work is not yet seasoned enough. Line quality is not a matter of thickness or blackness. It is a matter of whether there is “sinew” inside the line. Some lines look beautiful, but soften as soon as one tests them. Some lines are not especially pretty, but they have elasticity and inner force. Many lines in Wenjing’s work are visually pleasing, but the “sinew” is still insufficient. This is especially true of some thin lines, which at times become light and slippery. Running script most fears slipperiness. Once the line becomes slippery, it loses roughness and resistance.

In character structure, some individual characters also share similar postural habits. Slanting, elongating, and dropping downward appear again and again within the same work, and these methods can easily turn into habitual gestures. What a writer should fear most is not having no style, but having a style that too quickly becomes a mannerism. Wenjing’s (work already has a personal air, but one can also see certain habits. Some openings of left- and right-falling strokes, some endings of vertical strokes, and some treatments of the center of gravity repeat themselves. Repetition is not in itself wrong. But if there is not enough variation, the work offers fewer surprises as one keeps reading.

What is truly valuable in this work is that it does not turn running script into merely pretty writing. It is willing to let the characters have flaws. It is willing to let them breathe. It accepts dryness and wetness in the ink, and it lets the movement of the lines sway. This shows that the writer does not merely want to write “correctly.” The writer wants to enter a more complex state of writing. The higher difficulty of calligraphy often lies not in order, but in whether the work can still stand after order has been broken. Wenjing has reached that threshold. Yet in some places, the order has been broken without the work fully standing firm.

A fair judgment of this piece would be this: it is a running-script work with breath, an aesthetic direction, and an awareness of the model-book tradition. Its strengths lie in its naturalness, its lack of affectation, and its certain layers of ink and line movement. Its weaknesses lie in insufficient bone force, somewhat loose closure, lingering habits in parts of the brushwork, and the final breath of the overall composition not being fully fastened. It is not a mediocre work. But it has not yet reached the level of a fully mature major work.

The best part of Wenjing’s (writing is the feeling that the words are “walking” across the paper. They are not dead characters. The characters move. The ink moves. The spacing between the lines moves as well. Yet calligraphy cannot only move. It must also sink. Movement without depth easily becomes floating. Depth without movement easily becomes stiff. Wenjing’s current strength is movement. What needs to be added next is depth. Depth does not mean writing slowly. Nor does it mean writing darkly. It means that every stroke must enter the paper, every character must stand even while leaning, and every line must carry bone even while it loosens.

This is also the hardest part of running script. Running script appears free, but in truth it is the least free. The rules of regular script stand in the open. The rules of running script hide in the dark. A writer of running script may seem able to connect, break, slant, dry out, and release the brush at will. But every release must have the ability to return. Without return, release becomes looseness. Without bone, life becomes slipperiness. Wenjing’s work already has the desire to open out, and it also has quite good aesthetic intuition. If the brush force, structure, and compositional closure can be worked deeper, the writing will become more durable and carry more weight.

The value of this running script lies in the fact that it presents an important direction: within the movement of the traditional model-book lineage, it seeks a way of writing that is not too loud, yet carries a contemporary air. It does not rely on oddity, size, or visual bombardment. It relies instead on the warmth between brush and ink. This is a path worth continuing. But if the path is to go far, feeling alone will not be enough. The writing must return to the ancients, to the line itself, and to the skeleton of every character. The breath is already there. The next question is whether the sinews and bones can grow.

What makes this Apology for Misconduct After Drinking（《醉后失礼谢书》）pleasing is not that it is “beautiful” in the usual sense. It is that it is alive. It is not a temple stele, not a piece of polished court-style regular script, and not a refined little object later calligraphers deliberately shaped for connoisseurs. It feels more like a man who has sobered up after drinking, his face still red, sitting at a table and writing an apology while feeling both regretful and faintly ridiculous. That is why the writing does not put on airs, and neither does the prose. In the characters there is constraint, a slight wobble, the nervous haste of someone trying to explain himself, and also a touch of self-mocking charm.

This text comes from the Dunhuang manuscripts（敦煌遗书）, numbered Or.8210/S.2200, and belongs to the Dunhuang manuscript materials held within the British Library system. It is often described in related accounts as a Tang-dynasty Dunhuang document, a written apology for “misconduct after drinking,” and is commonly dated to 856 C.E., in the late Tang period. Its nature is closer to a model letter or a sample of practical writing than to an original note written by some particular drunk man to a particular recipient. And yet ancient model letters, even when they were templates, often preserved the warmth of real life. They were not abstract ritual rules. They were a social language for asking forgiveness, saving face, and making one’s embarrassment sound polite.

The most interesting thing about this little letter lies just there: its content is an apology, but its tone is not solemn or anguished; its writing is in running-regular script, yet its structure carries a clumsy spark of spirit. It is as if a well-behaved man lost his composure for a moment, and the next day hurried to stuff himself back into the world of manners. But he does not quite manage it. The awkwardness of last night’s drunkenness, and the embarrassment of the morning after, are still trembling in the gaps between the characters.

How a “Man Who Has Just Sobered Up” Speaks

The general meaning of this Apology for Misconduct After Drinking（《醉后失礼谢书》）is as follows. Because the Dunhuang manuscript（敦煌写本）is damaged in places, and because there are differences in copying and interpretation, a few characters may vary slightly. The version below follows the more common reading and is arranged with reference to the text visible in the image.

Classical text in Chinese:

昨日多饮，醉甚过度。麁踈言词，都不醒觉。朝来见诸人说，方知其由。无地容身，惭悚尤积。本缘小器，到次满盈，伏望仁明，不赐罪责。续当面谢，先状咨申。伏惟鉴察。不宣，谨状。

Yesterday I drank too much, and became far too drunk. My words were crude and careless; I was not aware of myself at all. This morning, after hearing others speak of it, I finally learned what had happened. I have no place to hide myself, and my shame and fear have only grown deeper. It was simply that my vessel was small, and after repeated rounds it overflowed. I am deeply uneasy, deeply uneasy. I humbly hope that your kind and clear judgment will not lay blame upon me. I shall later come in person to apologize. For now, I first submit this written statement. I humbly ask you to examine the matter. I shall say no more. Respectfully submitted.

This is not an ordinary “I’m sorry.” It knows how to assume a posture, and it also knows how to leave itself a way out. It begins by admitting fault: “Yesterday I drank too much, and became far too drunk.” Then it says that “my words were crude and careless; I was not aware of myself at all.” In other words, what he said was rough and improper, but he was not sober then. There is an apology here, but also a gentle easing of blame: this is not who he usually is; it happened because he was drunk.

The best line is “It was simply that my vessel was small, and after repeated rounds it overflowed.” This sentence can almost be taken as the eye of the whole piece. On the surface, it says that his capacity for drink was limited, and that cup after cup made him drunk. But deeper down, it uses the word “vessel” to make fun of himself. The vessel is small, so it fills easily. It is small, so it overflows easily. It is small, so it cannot hold the occasion. This is not mere excuse-making. It is a foolish, sincere, and rather funny way of spelling out one’s own embarrassment.

Here the “playful naïveté” of the piece appears. “Playful” does not mean merely comic, and “naïve” does not mean childish. It means that, under the pressure of ritual propriety, a bit of true temperament slips out. The writer knows he should apologize. He knows he should lower himself. But he is not producing a stiff formula. There is social awkwardness in it, a softness in the voice, and the very real feeling of waking up and thinking, “Good heavens, what exactly did I do last night?”

A Distinctive Structure: Not Quite Upright, Yet Possessing Its Own Balance

As calligraphy, this work may broadly be placed in the line of running-regular script. Regular script forms its bone, while running script gives it movement. Each character remains legible, and the writing does not take off into cursive flight. But the strokes do not stand entirely within the rules of regular script either. Its beauty lies precisely between order and loss of control.

The structure of the characters has several clear features.

Many of the characters are somewhat elongated. Instead of opening horizontally, they are drawn downward. Characters such as “drunk,” “excessive,” “passed,” “words,” “speech,” “awake,” “aware,” “hope,” “blame,” and “punishment” have a strong vertical tendency, as if the person writing them were standing a little stiffly, shoulders drawn in, not daring to spread himself out. This fits the content very well. A man writing an apology will not write with bold, sweeping grandeur. He needs to lower his head. He needs to pull himself in. He needs to make his body smaller. The lengthened shape of the characters gives just that feeling.

The left-and-right structures also often show a slight imbalance. This is not the perfectly steady structure of Tang regular script. In some characters the left side is heavy and the right side light. In some, the upper part is tight and the lower part loose. Some strokes crowd together, while other places suddenly open up. This is not a failure of writing ability. It is the kind of on-the-spot feeling often found in practical writing. The writer knows the basic rules, but he has not worked the text over and over as one would for an inscription on stone. The hand is hurried, and the mind is hurried too. So the characters contain the life of something that has “no time to be dignified.”

The line movement is also slightly unsteady. The vertical columns are not perfectly straight. Some characters press close to one another; others pull slightly away. Seen as a whole, the columns do not look like pillars in a temple. They look more like speech, with sentences that speed up and slow down, and breaths that rise and fall. This matters a great deal. In much calligraphy practice today, the single characters may be passable, but the movement between lines is dead. Each character looks like a specimen placed on the page, with no real relation to the others. Apology for Misconduct After Drinking（《醉后失礼谢书》）is the opposite. The individual characters may not be exquisite, but there is feeling between the lines. It sounds like a man explaining himself in a low voice: the more he explains, the more ashamed he becomes, and the more ashamed he becomes, the more he wants to end it quickly.

The brushwork has the flavor of being “skilled but not polished.” These strokes were not made by an untrained hand. The horizontal strokes, vertical strokes, left-falling and right-falling strokes, turns and joints all show the foundation of everyday Tang writing. But the work does not pursue splendor, nor does it deliberately display wrist strength. In many places the brush simply passes lightly and moves on. This kind of “good enough” writing is, in fact, more enduring than deliberate performance. It was not written for later viewers to admire, so it does not show off. Because it does not show off, it keeps its living breath.

This brings us to a larger point. The “playful naïveté” of calligraphy does not mean that the writing is untrained. It means that after training, it has not been strangled by rules. It has method, but it is not rigid. It has variation, but it is not chaotic. It has awkwardness, but the awkwardness is endearing.

How the Words and the Written Form Answer Each Other

What is most worth discussing in this work is not simply whether the characters are good, but how the characters and the content explain each other.

In content, it is about “misconduct after drinking.” This is not a solemn theme. It does not speak of loyalty and filial duty, nor of the fate of the family or the state. It speaks of a man who drank too much, said the wrong things, and woke the next day frightened enough to write an apology. The subject is small, but it is close to life. The ancients are no longer only people seated upright in inscriptions and biographies. They are not only figures wrapped in the concepts of history books. They too got drunk. They too spoke nonsense. They too feared being blamed. They too tried to make things right the next morning.

The written form has the same smallness. The page is not a grand scene, and the handwriting is not broad and expansive. It is cramped, fine-grained, practical, and touched with the smoke and warmth of ordinary documents. For this reason, the line “It was simply that my vessel was small, and after repeated rounds it overflowed” forms a curious echo with the shape of the writing. The words say the vessel is small, and the characters do not pretend to be large. The words say it overflowed, and the spaces between the characters also feel pressed. The words say he is deeply uneasy, and the posture of the writing is indeed a little unsettled.

Around the phrase “I humbly hope that your kind and clear judgment will not lay blame upon me,” the brush clearly pulls itself in. It does not open out as much as the earlier narration does. It becomes more respectful. This is not description, nor is it lyric expression. It is a plea. The writing of a man who is pleading cannot be too bold. It is as if ritual propriety tugs at the writer’s hand, and the characters lower themselves with it.

This is what criticism of calligraphy most often misses. Many people look at ancient ink traces only for brush method, structure, and composition, but do not ask what occasion produced them. A letter is not a stele. The core of a letter is not “form,” but “relationship.” To whom was it written? Why was it written? Was the writer afraid, hurried, ashamed? All these things enter the shape of the characters. In Wang Xizhi’s（王羲之）letters there is the ease of aristocratic life. In Yan Zhenqing’s（颜真卿）Draft of a Requiem to My Nephew（《祭侄文稿》）there is overwhelming grief and anger. In Su Shi’s（苏轼）Cold Food Observance（《寒食帖》）there is the pressure and surge of exile. Apology for Misconduct After Drinking（《醉后失礼谢书》）certainly cannot be compared with these canonical works in artistic height. But it has another rare quality: the truth of writing in a small scene, by a small person, in a small moment of embarrassment. Such truth is hard to fake.

Compared with Historical Letters: Low, Yet Not Vulgar; Small, Yet Full of Flavor

In the history of Chinese calligraphy, letters have always been the form that most clearly reveals the person. Stone inscriptions show us institutions. Handwritten letters show us human beings.

In Wang Xizhi’s（王羲之）Letter After the Snow Clears（《快雪时晴帖》）, only a few short lines are written, and what moves us most is a casual elegance. It says that the weather has cleared and sends greetings. The tone is light, yet it carries the clarity of the Wei-Jin gentry. Many of Wang Xizhi’s（王羲之）letters do not bear any grand narrative, but they allow us to feel the breath of a writer inside daily life.

Yan Zhenqing’s（颜真卿）Draft of a Requiem to My Nephew（《祭侄文稿》）is the opposite. It is not an ordinary letter, but a draft of a memorial text. Its corrections, dryness, pauses, and breaks are all traces pressed out by grief. Its greatness lies in the fact that it does not tidy grief up too neatly. The breaking of the characters and the breaking of the emotion are one process.

Su Shi’s（苏轼）Cold Food Observance（《寒食帖》）is different again. It contains the self-awareness of a literary man, the bitterness of a life in decline, and a talent that cannot help but surge outward. The movement of the writing grows from calm to rolling force, like pent-up feelings rising in the chest. It does not merely write of suffering. It turns suffering into a subtle artistic structure.

Apology for Misconduct After Drinking（《醉后失礼谢书》）is, of course, not on that level. It does not have the spirit of Wang Xizhi（王羲之）, the deep grief of Yan Zhenqing（颜真卿）, or the literary depth of Su Shi（苏轼）. Yet it has its own place. It allows us to see a layer often overlooked in the history of calligraphy: the charm of everyday practical writing. It is not the writing of a lofty gentleman, not the writing of a loyal minister, and not the writing of a great man of letters. It is an ordinary piece of social communication, a “letter asking to be forgiven.” It is low, yet not vulgar. It is small, yet full of flavor.

More importantly, it offers another standard of beauty. The beauty of many classical masterpieces is the beauty of maturity, depth, tragic grandeur, or free refinement. The beauty of this piece is the beauty of “playful naïveté.” It is a little clumsy, a little sincere, a little comic, and a little panicked. It is not trying to win admiration, but trying not to offend. It is not trying to make a name, but trying to get through a situation. Just because it was not made for art, it preserves the thing art most fears losing: living energy.

“Playful Naïveté” Is Not Pretending to Be Cute; It Is Not Being Swallowed by Technique

Calligraphy today often lacks this kind of “playful naïveté.” The reason is not hard to understand. Many people begin calligraphy by copying models. They move through Ouyang Xun（欧阳询）, Yan Zhenqing（颜真卿）, Liu Gongquan（柳公权）, and Zhao Mengfu（赵孟頫）, and over time their characters come to look more and more like “characters from a copybook.” This is, of course, necessary. Without rules, writing easily falls apart. Without brush method, there is no calligraphy to speak of. The problem is that many people are left with only rules. The cleaner the writing becomes, the less life it has. Every character looks carefully staged; the strokes are faultless, but feeling cannot enter.

There is another problem: an excessive pursuit of “calligraphic effect.” The moment the brush touches the paper, the writer wants ancient flavor. At every turn, the writer wants a source. The whole piece seems to be saying, Look, I understand tradition. But the more one does this, the more easily the writing becomes old, slick, and false. The real ancients were not “acting like ancients” with every stroke. They wrote letters, kept accounts, copied books, and drafted statements because they had things to do. The beauty of calligraphy grew out of those things. It was not a decoration pasted on afterward.

This is where Apology for Misconduct After Drinking（《醉后失礼谢书》）speaks to us today. It reminds us that calligraphy is not only the result of copying models; it is also a trace of life. Writing gains energy when it has a use. If a person writes only phrases like “high mountains and flowing waters” or “tranquillity reaches far” on fine paper, over time he may fall into an empty elegance. It is not that such phrases cannot be written. It is that they cannot be the only things one writes. What truly nourishes writing is everyday writing: letters, notes, journals, slips to friends, and words with a real recipient, a real occasion, and a real tone.

“Playful naïveté” is not deliberately writing crookedly, deliberately writing clumsily, or deliberately pretending to be innocent. That would be worse. Its condition is that the hand has some foundation, while the mind has no heavy desire to perform. It has rules, but is not strangled by rules. It has temperament, but does not shout its temperament. In this Apology for Misconduct After Drinking（《醉后失礼谢书》）, one can see both training in the writing and the state of the moment. It is neither wild trickery nor courtly stiffness. It stands between the two, and that is why it feels so close.

What It Teaches Writers Today

This work offers at least three lessons for writing today.

The characters should fit the content. When writing an apology, the writing should not be too aggressive. When writing casually, it need not be too solemn. When writing grief, it should not pretend to be beautiful. Calligraphy is not one style applied to every kind of content. Good writing should let us hear the tone.

Calligraphy should return to the feeling of the letter. By that feeling, one means that there is a recipient, a situation, and an exchange. People who practice calligraphy today might write more real short prose and fewer empty famous phrases. They might write to friends, write to themselves, keep a diary, or write a letter that could actually be sent. Once characters enter a relationship, they are less likely to die on the page.

Nor should one fear a little awkwardness. Overly clever writing often tires the eye. If it knows too well how to arrange itself, how to take a posture, and how to show off its wit, it loses aftertaste. The value of Apology for Misconduct After Drinking（《醉后失礼谢书》）lies in the fact that it does not make every place perfect. It has rough places, crooked places, crowded places, and weak places. Yet these do not damage it. Instead, they make it seem like a living person.

Calligraphy education today too easily produces a “correct hand,” but it does not do enough to produce a “responsive hand.” A correct hand can write standard characters. A responsive hand can write a human situation. This little Dunhuang letter（敦煌小札）is imperfect, but it responds. It responds to shame. It responds to ritual. It responds to the embarrassment after drinking. It responds to the psychology of asking for forgiveness. It is these responses that allow a soft light to shine through an ordinary document.

A Large Life Inside Small Characters

Apology for Misconduct After Drinking（《醉后失礼谢书》）is not the sort of major work that would appear as the grand finale in a history of calligraphy. It is small, narrow, old, even a little shabby. But it has a beauty that is increasingly rare today: it does not pose, does not stiffen, and does not lift itself onto a high platform. It speaks from a low place, and it moves us in a small place.

Its structure is not perfect Tang regular script, nor is it the elegant running script of a famous master. It is writing from a concrete occasion. The characters are slightly long, the line movement slightly wavering, and the structures sometimes cramped, sometimes loosened. It is like a man who has just sobered up, trying to regain his balance at the edge of ritual propriety. The content says “the small vessel overflowed,” and the writing carries the cuteness of that small vessel. The content says “I have no place to hide myself,” and the writing carries a shrinking shame. The content says “I will later apologize in person,” and the writing, too, seems not yet finished, as if the note has been hurriedly placed in someone’s hand first.

This is its beauty of “playful naïveté.” It does not win by grandeur, nor does it press us with mastery. It lets us believe that ancient life was not only classics, institutions, and great principles. It also contained drunkenness, misconduct, embarrassment, apologies, and regret on the morning after. When calligraphy is left with only technique, it moves farther and farther away from the human being. This little Dunhuang letter（敦煌小札）shows the opposite: the writing that truly lasts is often not the most perfect writing, but the writing in which a person can still be seen.

Zhao Mengfu’s (赵孟頫) calligraphy is easy to underestimate and hard to truly understand. It is underestimated because it looks too “smooth,” too apt, too much as if everything came without effort. Many people, on first seeing Zhao Mengfu’s (赵孟頫) hand, reach for the same words: rounded, polished, elegant, steady, even a little “sweet.” The Danba Stele (《胆巴碑》) is not the kind of work that wins by posture alone. On the surface it is warm and supple, yet inside it has sinew; on the surface it is quiet, yet inside it has force; on the surface it seems not to contend, yet at the core it is strong. That is exactly what is hardest about Zhao Mengfu (赵孟頫): he does not rely on danger or oddity to overawe the eye, does not prop up the façade with dryness and hardness, and does not manufacture weight by feigning age. Beneath an exterior of extraordinary calm and composure, he kneads discipline, cultivation, control, and aesthetic judgment into the strokes, little by little.

The Danba Stele (《胆巴碑》) is one of the most representative running-regular stele works from Zhao Mengfu’s (赵孟頫) mature years. The man commemorated by the stele was Danba (胆巴), an important Tibetan Buddhist monk of the Yuan dynasty, and the text itself carries an obvious double background, both official and religious. That is why this work is not merely the small, private pleasure of a personal letter. It is a large-scale script meant to stand in the halls of power and endure in stone. What shows the greatest mastery is the way it settles the flowing spirit of the model-book tradition into the more solemn, public, and ordered form of an inscription. Put another way, it is neither pure regular script nor a free-running cursive hand, but a running-regular script tuned to a very high degree: the framework of regular script stands firm, while the movement of the lines never breaks. That balance is a mark of exceptional calligraphic skill.

The first striking impression this work gives is one of wholeness. Wholeness here does not mean stiffness, still less the stale air of court calligraphy, but a command of the whole. Seen vertically, the spacing from column to column is even, the flow runs straight through, and there is no showy lurching or tilting. Seen horizontally, the size of the characters, their center of gravity, and their opening and closing are all arranged with steadiness. Yet if one says only that it is orderly, one still has not reached its finest point. What is truly remarkable is that this order is not mechanically laid out. It is alive throughout. Take characters such as “dragon” (龍), “prosper” (興), “temple” (寺), “master” (師), “illuminate” (照), and “compassion” (慈). Their strokes are numerous, yet the structures do not clog. Zhao Mengfu (赵孟頫) is especially adept at letting dense places breathe. Wherever a character needs to gather itself, it gathers; wherever it needs to loosen, it yields a fraction. So it looks full but never heavy; it looks stable but never rigid.

The core of Zhao Mengfu’s (赵孟頫) script still lies in the use of the brush. The lines in The Danba Stele (《胆巴碑》) are based largely on the centered tip, with rounded beginnings and rounded endings, and little of the sharp, exposed cutting motion that some writers deliberately flaunt. Zhao Mengfu (赵孟頫) did not much care to display the edge of the brush in plain sight. He was subtler than that, and older in his understanding. He hides the edge in the middle section of the stroke, so that what the eye first sees is roundness, and only afterward does one begin to feel the elasticity and firmness inside it. This act of concealment is no small thing. Many people who study calligraphy drift to one of two ends: either they go soft and collapse into mere smoothness, or they force a dry, acrid effect, as if cutting wounds into the paper with the brush. The Danba Stele (《胆巴碑》) is neither. Its lines have flesh and bone. The flesh keeps them from turning gaunt; the bone keeps them from turning coy.

This work is especially worth studying in its treatment of horizontal and vertical strokes. Zhao Mengfu’s (赵孟頫) horizontal strokes are not dead flats. They often carry a slight rise and fall. The opening lifts lightly, the middle section steadies, and the ending closes cleanly, with no trailing mud. Such horizontals look calm, yet there is rhythm inside them. The verticals tend to be full through the middle, like a stalk of bamboo with resilience in it—not the dead hardness of steel rebar, but a restrained spring. The left-falling and right-falling strokes are measured as well; they never flare too wildly. The endings of the right-falling strokes in particular usually do not fly out far, and their closing is very clean. That gives the entire character an immediate air of refinement. Refinement is not weakness. Quite the opposite. It shows that the writer knows where there is no need to show off force.

The structure of Zhao Mengfu’s (赵孟頫) characters has always been the point most debated by later generations. Those who admire him say his work is precise, steady, graceful, and elegant. Those who dislike him say it is too smooth, lacking strange energy and the cutting edge that presses in on the viewer. The Danba Stele (《胆巴碑》) shows that both judgments tell only half the story. Zhao Mengfu’s (赵孟頫) script does indeed avoid the path of perilous extremity. He does not chase the skewed drama of Huang Tingjian (黄庭坚), nor the sweeping, brushed velocity of Mi Fu (米芾). He cares more about inner order, balance of center, and the echo between components within the character. That is why his characters usually strike the eye first as apt or fitting. But that is the point: true aptness is itself extremely difficult. Zhao Mengfu (赵孟頫) is not incapable of danger; he simply does not place it on the surface. He hides it inside the structure. What looks level and proper is, in fact, constantly being adjusted from within. In left-right structures, one side is often held in while the other opens out; in top-bottom structures, he steadies the whole character by tightening the top and loosening the bottom, or by making the upper part lighter and the lower part sink. That is not a matter of filling a model-book grid. It is structural control of a very high order.

Another merit of The Danba Stele (《胆巴碑》), one that often goes unnoticed, is that it successfully catches the gravity of the stele and the fluidity of the model-book tradition at once. In the history of Chinese calligraphy, stele and model-book long formed two aesthetic lineages. Steles lean toward bone strength, squareness, the feel of the knife, and public presence; model-book writing leans toward brush intention, movement, literati grace, and the immediacy of the writing act. One of Zhao Mengfu’s (赵孟頫) greatest contributions was to lift up once again the orthodox line of the Two Wangs (二王)—Wang Xizhi (王羲之) and Wang Xianzhi (王献之)—while also making it capable of public inscription. The Danba Stele (《胆巴碑》) is typical in that respect. It is a stele text, yet nowhere in it is there the fierce, square-cut harshness of the Northern steles, nor the severe, pressing grandeur of large Tang regular-script inscriptions. What appears instead is a gentler, more fluid, more cultivated order. That order is not decline. It is a reconstruction under Yuan cultural conditions. Zhao Mengfu (赵孟頫) lived in the wake of the Song-Yuan dynastic transition. His political identity was complicated, and so was his cultural position. His “return to antiquity” was never a simple retreat to the ancients. It was, under a new structure of power and culture, an effort to find a stable footing once again for Han Chinese writing. So while he seems, on the surface, to turn back toward Wang Xizhi (王羲之) and Wang Xianzhi (王献之), what he is really doing is something very modern: turning ancient methods into an order that can be used again.

That is also why Zhao Mengfu’s (赵孟頫) significance in the Yuan calligraphic world cannot be confined to the level of “writing beautifully.” He was, in fact, the founding figure of Yuan model-book order. This becomes especially clear when he is set beside his contemporaries. Xianyu Shu (鲜于枢) had great momentum in his calligraphy. His brush force was fierce, his outward expansion strong, and his individuality unmistakable. In many places he is more exhilarating and more freely unrestrained. If one were speaking of sheer immediate excitement and abandon, Zhao Mengfu (赵孟頫) might not overpower Xianyu Shu (鲜于枢). But Xianyu Shu’s (鲜于枢) strength lies in force of temperament; Zhao Mengfu’s (赵孟頫) strength lies in system. He did not simply write well in a given moment. He reestablished an entire set of aesthetic principles that could be transmitted, learned, and used to build order. Look as well at Yuan figures such as Deng Wenyuan (邓文原) and Yu Ji (虞集). They too had skill, and they too had elegance. Yet once Zhao Mengfu (赵孟頫) enters the field, another level appears. Other Yuan writers often “can write”; Zhao Mengfu (赵孟頫) “can found a law.” Later, with Kangli Naonao (康里巎巎), one finds in cursive script a stronger sense of otherness and speed, and another face of Yuan calligraphy comes into view. But on the line of running-regular script and the building of orthodoxy, Zhao Mengfu (赵孟頫) remains the one who truly fixes the scale.

To speak of inheritance, one cannot avoid the Two Wangs (二王). Zhao Mengfu (赵孟頫) was, of course, a major inheritor of that system. Everyone knows that. Yet to say only that he “modeled himself on the Two Wangs (二王)” is too light a statement. What The Danba Stele (《胆巴碑》) truly shows is not only what he learned from the Two Wangs (二王), but how he placed their brush intention inside a stronger framework of regular script. The beauty of the Two Wangs (二王) lies in ease of movement, in scholarly grace, in a brush intention that seems to arise naturally. The trouble is that this line is especially liable to turn slick in lesser hands. Zhao Mengfu’s (赵孟頫) greatness lies precisely here: he fastened that fluidity back onto the sense of law and form that had developed since Tang regular script. So his writing is neither loose nor stiff. One might say that what is most precious in The Danba Stele (《胆巴碑》) is that it tames flow into order, yet does not let order crush flow.

Of course, the shortcomings of Zhao Mengfu’s (赵孟頫) calligraphy are also clear. Because he is so strong, these shortcomings were later exaggerated by other writers. One is that he truly does not win by perilous extremity. His style lacks a certain pressing sharpness and strangeness. Looking at The Danba Stele (《胆巴碑》), one feels it is excellent, steady, and fully mature. Yet some viewers still feel it does not quite satisfy. A second problem is that he is all too easy to imitate badly. Later generations, in studying Zhao Mengfu (赵孟頫), often absorbed only the rounded polish, the even finish, and the grace, but failed to learn the bone and control inside. The result was a slide into sweetness, softness, and the stale air of the academy style. Zhao Mengfu (赵孟頫) cannot be blamed for all of that, but it does show that his style has a border zone of its own: relax a little, and one can fall straight into it. A third point is that in some works, he can indeed become overly warm and smooth. The Danba Stele (《胆巴碑》), however, remains in good shape. It has not yet flattened into the emptiness and blandness of later academy writing. It still has sinew in it, and a hardness capable of holding the field.

A truly fair judgment would be this: The Danba Stele (《胆巴碑》) is not Zhao Mengfu’s (赵孟頫) most strange and arresting side, but it is the side that best represents his mature order. Its strength does not lie in marvel or extremity, but in steadiness; not in violence, but in depth; not in displaying force, but in hiding force inside discipline. A work like this may not be the one that makes a viewer cry out at first glance, yet it is the one that best survives repeated looking. One sees it once and feels it is good. One sees it ten times and only then begins to understand why.

In the end, what most moves a viewer in The Danba Stele (《胆巴碑》) is not simply that it is beautiful, but that it represents a very rare quality: it preserves vitality within order, keeps bone strength hidden within warmth, and completes creation within revival. That power is not only a power of calligraphy. It is a power of culture too. Truly mature art is often like this. It does not prove itself by shouting itself hoarse, and it does not try to intimidate by posing as deep. It simply places everything where it belongs. After one has lived with it for some time, one realizes that it weighs more than those things that astonish at a glance.

The Danba Stele (《胆巴碑》) is exactly such a work. It is not a victory of flashing brilliance. It is a steadiness left behind after brilliance has been ground down into the depths of the strokes. Once that layer is understood, one sees that Zhao Mengfu (赵孟頫) is neither “too rounded” nor “too seductive.” What is genuinely rare in him is that beneath an exterior so easily misread as gentle, he always preserves a solid and substantial bone strength.

Ren Jingjing (任晶晶)

In the debate around the Poem Handscroll Written in a Boat on Lake Wujiang (《吴江舟中诗卷》), the liveliest line of argument at the moment is to seize on a few awkward local details and quickly conclude, “This is not Mi Fu.” That kind of judgment has the immediate satisfaction of intuition, but not always the weight of real connoisseurship. In the authentication of ancient calligraphy, the greatest danger is not misreading a single character. It is making the question too narrow. What really needs to be asked is never just whether one particular character looks like Mi Fu, nor whether the work contains a few flaws. The real question is whether the piece was written out of a stable, mature, self-governing calligraphic consciousness of the kind one recognizes as Mi Fu’s.

In authoritative public catalogues, this work, the Wujiangzhou zhong shijuan (《吴江舟中诗卷》), still remains attributed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to Mi Fu, and dated to roughly the mid-1090s. The museum’s description points out that the most striking features of the scroll are the “compression, distortion, and deliberate imbalance” of its forms, and it emphasizes that Mi Fu, in this work, was not aiming to write characters that were neat and fully regularized. He was letting form serve expression. In other words, the abrupt shifts in scale, the local tilting, and the unstable balance are among the most emphasized formal traits of this scroll itself. They are not “flaws” that later viewers have only now discovered.

A museum attribution is not an oracle. The Met’s decision to classify it as a work by Mi Fu does not mean the controversy is over. The question is what kind of argument is strongest if one wants to argue that it is not by Mi Fu. The most common reasons are roughly these: the signature is suspicious; the characters jump wildly in size; a character such as che (车) is too slack in structure; common characters such as zhi (纸), di (滴), and di (底) are written incorrectly; and the overall air of the piece does not match Mi Fu’s accepted surviving works. The first few may look like hard evidence, but their evidentiary weight is not actually very high. What truly pushes the discussion forward is the last point: not simply that some local parts do not resemble Mi Fu, but that the whole scroll lacks a unified stylistic command when set beside Mi Fu’s reliable works. That is the most crucial level in the authentication of an ancient handscroll.

Take the signature first. Skeptics say that if the colophon at the end is signed “Mi Yuanzhang” (米元章), it already does not sound like Mi Fu. Did Mi Fu use “Mi Yuanzhang” in any other calligraphic works? That question cannot be answered by memory alone. In publicly accessible and verifiable official catalogues, one can indeed find cases where Mi Fu uses “Yuanzhang” in a signature, but the more common forms are not the bare three characters “Mi Yuanzhang.” More often one sees “Mi Fu Yuanzhang” (米芾元章) or “Xiangyang Mi Fu Yuanzhang” (襄阳米芾元章). The Authentic Handscroll of Calligraphy by Song Dynasty Mi Fu (《宋米芾书真迹卷》) in the National Palace Museum in Taipei carries the inscription, “In the first year of Shaosheng … written by Xiangyang Mi Fu Yuanzhang in the Baojin Studio.” That is a standard and important example from an accepted authentic work. A National Palace Museum study, A Reconsideration of Mi Fu’s Change of Name (《米芾更名再考》), makes clear that Mi Fu changed his name from Fu (黻) to Fu (芾) between the fourth and fifth years of the Yuanyou reign, and that in the early period after that change, the shape of his signatures had not yet fully stabilized and appeared in more than one form. Put another way, the appearance of “Yuanzhang” in an end signature is not in itself a problem. What really deserves scrutiny is whether this Poem Handscroll Written in a Boat on Lake Wujiang uses “Mi Yuanzhang” in a form that is too stripped-down and too much in the manner of later centuries. If one searches only the current body of public official catalogues, one still does not find an accepted authentic work using the bare three-character “Mi Yuanzhang” as the principal signature at the end of a scroll. Even so, the presence of “Yuanzhang” alone cannot support the conclusion that the work is a forgery. At most, one can say this: the end signature does not provide strong proof of authenticity, but it is not yet an ironclad proof of forgery either.

Now consider the claim that the characters are abruptly large and small. This sounds like the loudest objection, and it spreads most easily, because the eye catches it at once. The problem is that Mi Fu is precisely one of those Song calligraphers who cannot be judged by a standard of even size and tidy regularity. In its description of the Poem Handscroll Written in a Boat on Lake Wujiang, the Met deliberately treats this imbalance as part of the work’s appeal rather than a flaw. Put another way, if someone treats uneven scale itself as evidence of forgery, that means taking the work’s most central formal language, diagnosing it as a symptom, and only then using that symptom to infer falsity. The logic runs backward. Mi Fu’s large characters were always daring in release and daring in restraint. He could produce in composition an effect that looked imbalanced, while quietly drawing it back into coherence. Starting from “uneven size” alone, one can hardly deny any mature work by Mi Fu.

What about the claim that the character che (车) is structurally too slack? Is there any precedent? Mi Fu does not follow the path of Ouyang Xun (欧阳询), with its chiseled and almost engraved order, nor does he move in the manner of Yan Zhenqing (颜真卿), where the whole field is held down by massive gravity and force. In his running script and running-regular script, one often sees the center drawn tight while the limbs open outward, the center of gravity tilted while the brush intention pulls inward, local forms seeming to loosen and yet the whole always gathering back together. In Mi Fu, what looks “slack” is not a fault. It is often part of the work’s vitality. The real question is whether that looseness still has inner bone. Does it loosen and still stand? Or does it loosen and turn hollow? Does it open outward and then pull back? Or does it collapse once it has been released? A judgment of that kind cannot rest on grabbing a single character like che from an internet image.

Then there is the claim that common characters such as zhi (纸), di (底), and di (滴) are written incorrectly. Are there precedents for this? It is not unusual for major calligraphers of antiquity to write a character wrongly. What truly has value in authentication is not a random mistake of writing, but a systematic error that runs against the writer’s long-settled and stable habits. In an article from the Beijing Daily system on identifying forged works attributed to Mi Fu, one representative example is given: in the suspected forgery Chenlan Tie (《陈揽帖》), Mi Fu’s habitual way of writing a certain form is lost. That is not a mere lapse. It means the whole system of the author’s habitual writing has broken down. That is where real evidentiary force lies in authentication. If one wants to make an argument from the suspected miswriting of zhi, di, and di in the Poem Handscroll Written in a Boat on Lake Wujiang, then one must first line them up against the same characters, the same radicals, and the same structural patterns in Mi Fu’s reliable authentic works, and show that in those accepted works he never writes them this way, whereas in this scroll he repeatedly does. When a person writes a character wrongly, that mistake is part of a habit. It will not be wrong one day and correct the next. At present, no reliable evidence has been found to show that Mi Fu wrote zhi, di, or di incorrectly elsewhere. At least in the public material now available, no such precedent can be seen.

There is a principle in calligraphic authentication that is often overlooked, yet more fatal than seizing on a few mistaken characters: a great calligrapher may fail locally, but will not lose command of an entire scroll. That is to say, an occasional character may be ugly, strange, or skewed. Any of that can happen. But if a mature handscroll truly comes from a master, then at a deeper level it will still feel like the work of one person throughout: the decisions of brushwork will feel like one person, the propulsion of line will feel like one person, the breathing rhythm of the composition will feel like one person, and the distribution of danger and stability will feel like one person. Local passages may drift. The governing force cannot drift. This is especially true of Mi Fu. The hardest thing to learn in Mi-style calligraphy has never been the surface motions. It is the underlying power behind them: disorder that still holds together, risk that still gathers itself back in, speed that does not float away, release that does not dissolve.

That is exactly what makes the Poem Handscroll Written in a Boat on Lake Wujiang most open to suspicion. The issue is not that one character is unattractive, nor that one line is too exaggerated. It is that different passages present Mi-like qualities at uneven levels. Some characters really do look like the work of a master writing in bold release, and they do have the sudden tensile spread one finds in Mi Fu. Yet other characters suddenly go soft, like the work of someone who has learned only the outer motions and is imitating a “Mi Fu-style perilousness.” Some places still carry a certain decisiveness in the line, as if they were genuinely written. Other places feel more like a pose, as if the writer deliberately tilted the forms but never managed to gather the breath back in. In other words, the problem is not that the scroll looks nothing like Mi Fu. It is that at one moment it resembles him deeply, at another only shallowly; at one moment it resembles him in the bone, at another only in the skin. That is no longer a matter of single characters. It is a problem in the commanding unity of the whole scroll. Based on the visual evidence, one can clearly see that the control over large and small characters, the slanting energy between lines, and the relation between thick and thin strokes does not all operate at the same level. This uneven rise and fall is itself a serious point of suspicion.

To make that point more concrete, it can be broken down into several layers. The first is that the judgment of brushwork is not completely unified. The real Mi Fu may move quickly in lift and drop, and press hard in modulation, but inside the line there is always a hard bone. No matter how far the writing opens, tilts, or rushes past like a gust of wind, the middle of the line rarely empties out. Yet in the Poem Handscroll Written in a Boat on Lake Wujiang, some characters have force in the line, while others show only contrast between thick and thin, without that tense inner strength in the bone. More troubling still, these two states alternate. They do not look like the continuous work of one person moving through one emotional current. They look more like a writer whose grip on “Mi flavor” enters at times and slips away at others. A single character may still pass, but once the view expands to the whole scroll, the instability becomes clear. In the body of the scroll, several especially large characters do not form a natural progression of force and bony structure with the smaller characters around them. They look more like forced contrast.

The second is that the breathing of the composition is not fully unified. The most formidable thing about Mi Fu’s compositional method is that, for all its swaying and instability, the whole piece feels as though it has been driven through in one breath. Character spacing, line spacing, scale, and center of gravity are all in motion, but that motion follows an inner law. The Met emphasizes the “deliberate imbalance” of the Poem Handscroll Written in a Boat on Lake Wujiang precisely because a truly high form of imbalance is not chaos. It is control. The problem is that if one looks closely at the images you provided, some lines do indeed seem to push forward, with a clear vertical pull. Other lines suddenly tire out. The breath no longer moves on. It circles only inside the characters themselves. This kind of sectional loss of speed is not common in a mature master’s handscroll. It makes one suspect that the writer understood how to produce certain “Mi-style effects,” but did not have the ability to sustain that rhythm from beginning to end.

The third is that the ratio between risk and stability is not fully unified. Mi Fu is not simply perilous all the time. The greatness of genuine Mi calligraphy lies precisely in knowing where to risk, where to steady, where to release, and where one must gather back in. Risk is not spread flat across the whole sheet. It appears in local edge and movement, while the whole remains protected. What unsettles one about the Poem Handscroll Written in a Boat on Lake Wujiang is that the perilous parts and the stable parts feel as though they come from two different sets of judgment. Some characters are released to a nearly exaggerated degree, as though deliberately amplifying Mi Fu’s most exposed side. Yet other characters are written too conservatively, more like the ordinary tidying gestures one sees in common running script. So the whole scroll does not read like one person changing with rhythm. It reads more like several degrees of learning Mi Fu pressed together in one place. That makes it difficult to see it as the work of Mi Fu’s own hand. For no matter how much Mi Fu changes, his changes are always made under one personality and one aesthetic judgment. He does not become a beast in one line and a tepid practiced hand in the next.

That is why the lack of unity between this work and Mi Fu’s reliable corpus is not simply a matter of surface style words. It is a matter of the underlying mechanism of control. To say that it is not unified with Mi Fu does not mean it lacks slanted energy, or abrupt shifts of scale, or the swift pleasure of brushed writing. On the contrary, it has these things. The problem is that these things are not integrated by the same higher order of control. In the real Mi Fu, characters may grow suddenly large or small, but both large and small obey the same breath. Structure may tighten or loosen, but both tightening and loosening move around the same axis. Lines may grow thick or thin, but thick and thin still maintain continuity within the same bony law. In the Poem Handscroll Written in a Boat on Lake Wujiang, these relations do not always hold. At moments one feels it is very close to Mi Fu. At other moments it feels more like a person who can write well, who understands Mi methods, and who is “doing Mi.” That verb—doing—is the problem.

If this question is placed back within Mi Fu’s position in calligraphic history, the point of suspicion grows even clearer. Mi Fu is one of the easiest figures in the history of Chinese calligraphy for later imitators to mimic at the level of surface movement. Those who study Mi most easily learn three things first: the slant of the written force, the contrast of large and small, and the swiftness of the moving brush. The truly difficult thing is the fourth: the extremely precise inner balance behind all those motions. That is one reason Mi Fu became one of the authors with the greatest number of forged and imitated works in later ages. Scholars writing about the authentication of Mi’s calligraphy repeatedly issue the same warning: the more something looks “very Mi,” the more one must be on guard that it may simply have seized on his most exposed outer motions.

Seen from this angle, the problem with the Poem Handscroll Written in a Boat on Lake Wujiang is that it looks exactly like a work that understands Mi Fu’s surface style a little too well. It pushes “Mi flavor” outward with great effort. It pushes it wide, hard, and visibly. Yet what is most moving in genuine Mi calligraphy is often not those exposed gestures themselves, but the high order behind them, the ease with which they are released and gathered back in. If all one can do is write characters that lurch left and right, grow large and small, and sway dramatically, one is actually more likely to expose one’s weakness. Mi Fu is not established by strangeness alone. He is established by strangeness that still holds together. If there is only strangeness and no unity, then one is already far from the real Mi.

If the Poem Handscroll Written in a Boat on Lake Wujiang is truly to move toward a judgment of “not Mi,” the strongest blow should not fall on mistaken characters, nor on the claim that one or another character is simply ugly. It should fall on the uneven level of the whole scroll’s style. What does “uneven level” mean? It means some passages feel like the work of a first-rate calligrapher, some like the work of a second-rate expert, and some local areas like the work of a skilled copyist. The real Mi Fu, however much he sweeps, twists, and leaps, would not keep exposing that kind of drop in level throughout one scroll. Great masters can have differences in condition, but not to the point that one feels several hands have appeared in the same work. From the image of the piece, the large characters in the main text, the way lines answer one another, and the small script in the end inscription do not all belong to exactly the same spiritual level. This inconsistency deserves more attention than whether the character che is slack or whether zhi is wrongly written. It damages the root of the whole scroll.

Even here, the boundaries of fact still have to be respected. The public images, the published catalogues, and the common arguments now in circulation are still not enough, in a strict scholarly sense, to prove that the Poem Handscroll Written in a Boat on Lake Wujiang must not be by Mi Fu. To do that would require close study at the level of the original work itself: the paper or silk, the ink, the turning of the brush tip, the brush intention in the end inscription, the history of collection and transmission, and the record of earlier catalogues. The Met’s attribution still stands. That means major institutions have not abandoned Mi Fu’s authorship.

At the same time, one must also admit this: if the matter is discussed from within the internal logic of style, the deepest point of doubt in this work does not lie in a few glaring local flaws. It lies in the absence of that unified controlling force that runs through Mi Fu’s reliable works from start to finish. The signature is questionable, but not enough to prove forgery. The sharp differences in scale are questionable, but not enough to prove forgery. The slackness of the character che is questionable, but not enough to prove forgery. The suspected mistaken characters are questionable, but not enough to prove forgery. What truly pushes suspicion to a higher level is the way the scroll as a whole presents something “Mi-like, yet not unified,” “energetic, yet not steady,” full of gestures, yet lacking full inward gathering. That cannot be replaced by the easy phrase “it just doesn’t look right.” It is a deeper stylistic judgment: this scroll looks like the work of someone who had seen Mi Fu, understood a little of Mi Fu, and studied Mi Fu, but if one says it is the mature handscroll Mi Fu himself wrote out in one continuous breath, the chain of evidence is still not strong enough to persuade.

If one had to sum up the judgment on the Poem Handscroll Written in a Boat on Lake Wujiang in a single sentence, the most careful and forceful way to put it would not be, “A few characters are bad, so the work is fake.” It would be this: because the writing logic of the scroll as a whole does not accord with that higher unity one consistently finds in Mi Fu’s works—disorder that still holds together, risk that still gathers itself back in, variation that never dissolves into dispersal—it is difficult to accept it with confidence as an authentic work by Mi Fu.

Ren Jingjing (任晶晶)

When people talk about Zhao Puchu’s (赵朴初) calligraphy, the easiest mistake is to begin with “Buddhist spirit” or “Zen flavor.” Zhao Puchu did, of course, have a Buddhist identity, and not in any ordinary sense. He served for many years as president of the Buddhist Association of China, and for just as long appeared in public life as a leading figure in the Buddhist world and a prominent cultural presence. That is why, the moment people see his writing, they often fall into the habit of speaking of it in terms of “purity,” “emptiness,” or “a Zen-like quality.” Yet that way of talking can also hide what matters more in his calligraphy.

What makes Zhao Puchu’s calligraphy so rewarding to look at is not whether it “looks like the work of a Buddhist figure.” It is that he fused several things that do not easily sit together into a remarkably steady calligraphic temperament: the cultivated air of the traditional scholar-official, the sense of responsibility of a modern public figure, the compassion of a lay Buddhist, and the late style of an aging calligrapher. In his hands, these different layers do not clash, nor do they cancel one another out. They gradually come together as a whole.

Zhao Puchu was not the sort of professional calligrapher who developed a style inside the study and sought change purely within the internal system of brush and ink. Many of his works arose from inscriptions, commemorations, moral exhortations, Buddhist propagation, and social exchange. In other words, he did not first think, “I am going to make a calligraphic work,” and then set out to create. More often, he wrote at a very high level while handling practical matters and giving form to real-world expression.

That point of departure meant that Zhao Puchu’s calligraphy was unlikely to go to extremes. He did not build a name on the strange or the dangerous. He did not win by eccentric brilliance. He did not rely on the kind of gallery-style shock that seizes the eye at once. His calligraphy is not the sort that overwhelms on first sight. Its weight reveals itself only after one has looked at it for a while.

From these examples of running-regular and running script, the mature shape of Zhao Puchu’s style is actually quite clear. Whether in couplets like “Treat others with sincerity, and flowers bloom while the sun shines bright; handle affairs with alertness, and act with thunderous speed,” which lean toward secular ethics, or in works such as “With compassionate eyes he beholds all beings, his great vows deep as the sea; with the sun of wisdom he breaks through all darkness, and with goodness illumines the world,” which carry distinctly Buddhist language, the path is never one of the strange or the perilous. Instead, there is movement within order, suppleness within solidity. Running-regular script provides the frame; running script carries the breath. There is no deliberate straining for novelty here, and no display meant to show off technique. Zhao Puchu did not prevail through difference. He prevailed through steadiness.

At that point, one has to ask about the foundations of his style. Judging from the mature work, Yan Zhenqing (颜真卿) is plainly the most important base. One striking feature of Zhao’s writing is that it is never light. His strokes tend to be thick in their rise and fall. Pressure and release are clear. Horizontal strokes do not float. Vertical strokes do not sag. Even the left-falling and right-falling strokes avoid coquetry. This is especially true in his large-character couplets, where the inner structure is usually held firmly, the center of gravity is stable, and the outward spread on all four sides remains controlled. The whole piece gives a very clear sense of something that can stand.

A great deal of modern calligraphy fails precisely because it cannot stand. It is too light, or too slick, or too shallow, or else it pushes outward without restraint. Zhao Puchu had none of these faults. There is bone force in his writing, yet that force is not created through outward aggressiveness. It is an inward stability, one that can hold the whole piece in place. If one traces it back through tradition, it clearly belongs more to the spiritual resources of the Yan style.

Still, Zhao Puchu was not merely an extension of “Yan-style running-regular script.” If one looks closely at the flow of his lines, the turns of the brush, and the overall arrangement of a piece, one can still see the lineage of the model-letter tradition. Characters connect naturally to one another. The turns do not stiffen. The linking strokes are few, yet there is an undercurrent of connection. The whole piece has a warm, supple breath without ever becoming dull. This shows that he did not spend his life keeping faith with a single house style. He drew from many sources, and in the end leveled their traces and polished them into something of his own.

Zhao Puchu’s manner can be summed up like this: Yan as the bone, the Two Wangs (二王) as the pulse, with something of Chu Suiliang’s (褚遂良) clarity and order, Su Dongpo’s (苏东坡) elegance, and Zhao Mengfu’s (赵孟頫) rounded maturity. Yet these, in the end, are only sources, not the result. The real result is that once these traditional resources entered his hands, they were reorganized by a very particular cast of character.

People who learn from Yan often end up writing stiffly. Those who study the Two Wangs often become slick. Those who follow Su Shi (苏轼) can easily slip into the commonplace. Those who imitate Zhao Mengfu often grow overly sweet. What is rare in Zhao Puchu is that he largely avoided all of these dangers. His writing is not stiff, not slick, and not sweet. It has warmth, but not the kind of “gentleness” one poses into being. It has measure, but not the kind of “elegant correctness” that is designed in advance. What really matters here is not only training in brush method, but a person’s experience, cultivation, position, temperament, and the late condition of life.

That is why Zhao Puchu’s achievement in calligraphy lies not in technique but in the whole. It looks level and proper. It does not seem, like more perilous or extreme styles, loftily out of reach. Yet that is precisely what makes it so hard. Later learners can most easily pick up only the evenness and calm on the surface. What is truly precious in his work is the thickness slowly refined out of the person himself. That kind of thing cannot be copied through imitation.

As for brushwork, Zhao Puchu was not a calligrapher whose edge was bare to the eye. At first glance, his lines are not startling. They do not even seem especially “brilliant.” Yet the more closely one looks, the more they invite reflection. His opening strokes are usually restrained. Reversed and hidden tips are there, but never flaunted. He writes mainly with the centered brush, though not rigidly so, and side brushwork enters and exits naturally. In long left-falling strokes, right-falling strokes, and hooks, the brush will now and then open slightly, letting out a bit of the liveliness of running script. His closing strokes are broadly controlled. He does not flaunt dry-brush effects, nor does he force the look of a broken edge. The advantage of this method is that the line has thickness without becoming wooden; it has change without exhibition. Emotion, too, is held in check. Even when the content is impassioned, the brush still keeps its measure.

The couplet “Treat others with sincerity, and flowers bloom while the sun shines bright; handle affairs with alertness, and act with thunderous speed” is a typical example. Words like these already carry a strong sense of action. Push the writing too far, and it can easily turn into mere assertion. Zhao Puchu did not follow the content by raising the emotional pitch. He still governed the whole piece with a relatively steady brush. What comes through in the writing, then, is not a sense of being “forceful,” but a sense of being reliable. That is exactly what deserves the most attention in the deeper reaches of his calligraphy: it does not establish itself by intimidating the viewer, but by winning belief.

In structure, Zhao Puchu did not take the perilous, angular path of Ouyang Xun (欧阳询). Nor was he like Qi Gong (启功), with that cool finesse and nimble ingenuity. Nor was he like Lin Sanzhi (林散之), who broke structure open with the force of cursive script. Most of the time he adopted a method that keeps the inside tight, the outside more open, with the center firm and the edges slightly relaxed. A single character does not strive for the unusual. Yet when the characters are brought together, the whole piece moves with ease. This ease is not vulgar smoothness. It comes from structural logic that is clear, with primacy and secondary elements, contraction and release, fullness and emptiness all arranged with mature assurance.

That is why some people may feel that Zhao Puchu’s writing is “not startling.” It is true that he does not win by startling. But that does not mean he is flat. On the contrary, his mastery lies in turning “not startling” into a rare form of control. Many characters seem plain at first glance, then fall apart after a moment. Zhao Puchu’s do not. His writing is not meant to dazzle. It is meant to endure looking.

The same is true of his compositional method. He does not deliberately create dramatic contrasts of great opening and closing. He does not chase the kind of visual theater in which dense passages admit no air and sparse ones could let a horse through. Instead, he seeks change within a relatively even rhythm. The spacing between characters and lines is broadly balanced, yet never mechanically equal. Where it should press, it presses slightly; where it should loosen, it loosens a little. The whole piece breathes naturally. That sense of breath has much to do with his cultivation in poetry and prose. Once a poetic heart enters calligraphy, the writing naturally acquires a feeling for syntax, rhythm, and a current of movement that does not call attention to itself.

That is also why Zhao Puchu’s calligraphy cannot be judged only by the shape of individual characters. Look only at single characters, and one may find them not strange enough, not perilous enough, perhaps not even “exhibition-worthy.” But once the whole piece comes into view, the breath appears at once. What Zhao Puchu truly shaped was not only the character, but the order of the entire composition.

As for the use of ink, he was clearly not the sort of calligrapher who created effect through the drama of ink tones. He did not rely on swelling ink, aged ink, or flying white to catch the eye. He was closer to the traditional literati approach, in which ink obeys structure, follows the path of the brush, and serves the whole atmosphere of the piece. Where thickness is needed, it becomes thick; where dryness is needed, it becomes dry. Yet all of this comes naturally with the motion at hand and never turns into performance. This brings one great advantage: the ink never overpowers the brush. The problem in many works today is the reverse. Ink effects stand out too much, while brushwork retreats. The surface is lively, yet the calligraphy itself grows thin. Zhao Puchu was notably restrained in this regard.

This brings the discussion back to the notion of “Buddhist style.” Zhao Puchu certainly had a very deep relation to Buddhism, and he was one of the most important advocates of “Humanistic Buddhism” in modern China. But to place his calligraphy, on that basis alone, under the heading of “ethereal” or “Zen-like stillness” is too simple. What is truly related to Buddhist teaching in Zhao Puchu’s calligraphy lies not in emptiness, but in compassion, restraint, clarity, and vow. Take lines such as “With compassionate eyes he beholds all beings, his great vows deep as the sea; with the sun of wisdom he breaks through all darkness, and with goodness illumines the world.” In his hand, they are not airy, not desolate, and certainly not artificially detached from the world. Quite the opposite. They are solid, steady, and full of human presence. That solidity comes closer than any supposed “ethereality” to the core of Zhao Puchu’s spiritual world. For the Buddhism he understood was never about fleeing reality. It was about entering it; not emptying out life, but settling the heart, seeing suffering, and putting compassion into practice.

So the “Buddhist heart” in Zhao Puchu’s calligraphy is not the lonely austerity of cold mountain and dead wood, nor the nearly disciplinary thinness and chill of Hongyi’s (弘一) later years. It is closer to a mode of inward expression that remains in the world without being stained by it, that is dignified and yet warm. That balance is not easy to hold. Handle it badly, and the writing becomes either worldly platitude or a mere Buddhist pose. What is valuable in Zhao Puchu is that he more or less held that balance.

Place him beside calligraphers of his own time, and this position becomes clearer still. Compared with Qi Gong, he has less clever finesse and more thickness and steadiness; less sharp elegance and more weight. Compared with Lin Sanzhi, he has less of that vast, seasoned freedom of the transformed realm and more of a public ethical spirit that is readable, approachable, and usable. Compared with Sha Menghai (沙孟海), he has less epigraphic force and less pressure, more inwardness and literary grace. Compared with Shen Yinmo (沈尹默), the purity of his model-letter lineage may not be greater, yet the warmth of his character and the weight of lived reality stand out more strongly.

These comparisons help clarify Zhao Puchu’s limits. He is not the most perilous, nor the most strange. He is not the most heaven-gifted, nor the one most likely to astonish by technique. But he has something increasingly rare today: a stable relation between brush and character.

The problems in today’s calligraphy world often come from two extremes. One is over-formalization. Works become more and more “exhibition-like,” the visual effect grows stronger, and character grows weaker. The other is an excessive concern with lineage. People can speak at length about the sources of steles and model books, yet when it comes to themselves, lived experience never enters the work. What Zhao Puchu reminds people of is exactly this: calligraphy is certainly a matter of technical history, but it is not only that. It is also a history of character, a history of experience, and a history of use. In the end, what writing expresses is not a handful of brush rules, but how a person understands the world, settles the self, and faces other beings.

In that sense, what is most precious about Zhao Puchu is not that he left behind so many “masterpieces” that can be catalogued and labeled. It is that he proved something: within the complexity of modern life, traditional brush and ink can still be lived out as a credible moral form. That is precisely why Zhao Puchu’s calligraphy remains so worthy of repeated looking and careful study.

Ren Jingjing

From Mi Fu to Wang Duo

The title tells us that this is an inscription written for Mi Fu’s “Poem Written Aboard a Boat on the Wu River” (Wujiang Zhouzhong Shi, 《吴江舟中诗》). That means Mi Fu (米芾) cannot be avoided. The moment many people see Wang Duo (王铎), and see this kind of plunging, slanting, off-center movement, they rush to say that he was “learning from Mi.” Mi Fu was the one who played most brilliantly, and changed most brilliantly, along this path of what may be called “humor.” Many of his characters refuse to behave. Where a form ought to sit level, he lets it tilt a little. Where it ought to feel full, he deliberately leaves a bit of emptiness. Where it ought to settle firmly, he makes it sway first. There is a strong sense of play in this. In Mi Fu’s running script, for example, the center of gravity often does not sit rigidly in the middle. It slips lightly to one side, then is drawn back by the brush momentum and by the next character. That motion—leaning away, then being pulled back—is itself a kind of brush intelligence. It is like a very clever speaker who never moves in a straight line, who always turns slightly aside first, makes you pause, and only then leads you back. In calligraphy, humor often hides inside exactly this process: imbalance first, recovery after.

In Mi Fu’s so-called “brushed writing,” what is strongest is its spirit. It has a quick, unbound adaptability. It has slanted forms and rapid brushwork. Wang Duo clearly absorbed much from Mi’s writing, especially that refusal to remain square and settled, that diagonal lift that makes characters come alive. But Wang Duo is not simply an extension of Mi Fu. He is heavier than Mi, harsher than Mi, and more transformed by what came later.

Wang Duo plainly understood Mi Fu, and understood him deeply. But he was not Mi Fu’s duplicate. What Mi Fu gave him was a way of being alive on the page, not a set of outward templates. Once it reaches Wang Duo, Mi Fu’s lightness becomes weightier, Mi Fu’s quickness grows denser, and that elegant wit in Mi’s writing is pulled into the tense historical fate of a man from the late Ming. The Princeton University Art Museum, in discussing Wang Duo, stresses that he worked for years from classical model texts, especially within the Two Wangs tradition, and turned that classical elegance into a highly inventive language of his own. That point matters. Wang Duo did not study one lineage alone. He took in a whole range of classical masters, then broke out from inside them. Mi Fu was only one key spark in that chain.

Mi Fu’s sense of fun is mostly the liveliness of a literatus. It carries a bit of arrogance, a bit of fastidiousness, and a confidence that says, “I know what I am looking at.” Wang Duo is different. He enlarges that liveliness, and also deepens it. His writing has an added layer of wet ink, an added layer of torsion, and a stronger sense of pressure on the surface of the paper. So when both men write on the slant, Mi Fu feels more like an immortal in flight, while Wang Duo feels more like a drunken general. When both men are clever, Mi Fu feels more like lucid conversation, while Wang Duo feels more like wind charged with electricity.

So although this inscription takes Mi Fu’s poem as its point of departure, its real temperament is unmistakably Wang Duo’s own. It is not speaking on Mi Fu’s behalf. It uses Mi Fu as an entrance, then drives hard into its own structural taste and formal personality.

When people talk about Wang Duo, many first think of “large,” “dangerous,” “like strewn rocks,” “swelling ink in motion.” They think of that force that comes down in one sweep and nearly overturns the page. But if one sees only that layer, one is still seeing too little. What is good in Wang Duo lies not only in force, but in intelligence; not only in gravity, but in wit. Put another way, his writing contains something that has rarely been discussed with enough seriousness: humor.

The humor meant here is not joking, not frivolity, and not writing characters into grotesque shapes. It is a high level of judgment in writing. It allows a character to survive even in danger, to remain refined even in strangeness, and to stay measured even in exaggeration. This work, Wang Duo’s Inscription for Mi Fu’s “Poem Written Aboard a Boat on the Wu River”, shows that very clearly. Even from the few lines visible in the screenshot, it is already clear that Wang Duo is not simply asking, “Whom do I resemble?” He is using Mi Fu’s poem, and using the channel of running script, to release his own temperament—knotted yet alive, lofty yet playful—layer by layer.

What is most moving in this piece is not that every character is beautiful, nor that every stroke is perfectly exact. It is that the work as a whole has an air of speech. It does not put on airs. It does not sit stiffly. It is not even afraid of a little deliberate skew, a little deliberate tilt, a little deliberate compression. That is why it lives.

Wang Duo’s Humor Lies in Structure

It is easy to go astray when discussing humor in calligraphy. The moment many people hear the phrase “sense of humor,” they think about content. They ask whether the text itself is playful, or whether the calligrapher’s personality was witty. But when the issue is brought back to calligraphy itself, humor shows itself first in structure. That means how a character stands, how it tilts, how it is made deliberately unstable and yet does not fall.

What Wang Duo does best is this: he knows how to make a character structurally off balance, and then save it at the very last instant. This way of writing carries a kind of sharpness in itself. It is like a person speaking who deliberately lets the line of thought turn aside first, makes you start, and then lands it securely. That effect—almost going wrong, then coming right—is calligraphic humor.

In this work, the scale of the characters, the left-right weighting, and the opening and closing of upper and lower parts are all far from conventional. The characters are not lined up neatly like ranks of soldiers. They are more like a group of figures, each with its own personality, each glancing at the others, yielding to them, or jostling for room. Once that happens, they are no longer dead characters. They are living characters. They are no longer standard units. They become individuals with a temper of their own.

The danger in the character xi (羲), as you noted, is observed exactly right. This character shows both Wang Duo’s mischievousness and his real mastery. Xi is difficult to write to begin with. The right side is dense and complicated, while the left side is weak in support. If one is careless, it comes apart. Wang Duo refuses to write it evenly. Instead, he deliberately pulls the left and right apart and makes the contrast in scale very strong. The left side looks like a slanting brace. The right side looks like a heavy cluster of energy, about to drop but not quite dropping. The character looks precarious, a little shaky, even a little theatrical in the way it flaunts danger. But if one looks closely, it becomes clear that this is not recklessness. Its hidden axis is still there. Its center of gravity has not really slipped away. The danger is real, and so is the control. Humor in calligraphy often appears exactly here: he could have written it obediently, but instead he writes as if he were walking a tightrope. The viewer grows nervous for him, while he has already calculated everything in advance.

The traditional characters in this work are especially interesting. Characters such as Fu (芾), guan (观), fen (焚), wo (卧), fa (法), and xian (献) are not spread out step by step in a regular way. Each one is stretched into an exaggerated internal tension of its own. Wang Duo is never afraid of partial loss of control when handling complex characters. Quite the opposite. He often makes one part swell, another contract, one corner crowd in tightly, one sweep run unusually long. The result is that a character no longer functions as a mere unit of recognition. It becomes a form with expression.

Take Fu (芾). Written conventionally, it easily goes flat. Wang Duo usually refuses to let it go flat. He often writes the left side so that it spreads and jumps, giving the whole character a sense of weight on the left and lightness on the right. Once that feeling appears, the character has drama. It is like someone who ought to be sitting upright, yet suddenly leans forward just a little. The motion is small, but it is vivid.

The character guan (观) works the same way. The right side is already complex. If it is written too evenly, it turns dull. Wang Duo often pulls one component open on purpose, or squeezes one part off center, so that the right side arrives at a condition of being almost dispersed, but not quite. The character becomes nimble and even a little sly. It is not obedient, but neither is it out of hand. It is a way of tampering inside the rules.

The characters fen (焚), wo (卧), fa (法), and xian (献) show even more clearly that Wang Duo does not handle complex characters by “filling them up,” but by “bringing them to life.” That matters. Many people, when writing dense traditional forms, end up just piling on strokes, as if fitting parts into a grid. Wang Duo does not. He knows that what complex characters fear most is uniformity. Once uniformity enters, the character goes dull. So he works precisely against that. In some places he compresses hard, as if deliberately stopping the air from passing through. In other places he suddenly opens things out, like a window left on a crack. Between contraction and release, the character develops breath, expression, and humor.

Humor is not an ornament. It is a way of keeping complexity from dying. Wang Duo understood that very deeply.

Exaggeration Is Where the Smile in This Work Lives

If one asks which kind of change in this work most directly creates its sense of play, the answer is still exaggeration in upper-and-lower structure. For examples—shen (深), lan (兰), and de (得)—are exactly the right set to point to. These are the kinds of characters in which Wang Duo’s structural play is easiest to see.

The character shen (深) is easy to write literally, and easy to write dully. Its left and right parts are already complicated. If the upper and lower parts are then also treated too evenly, the whole character sinks. Wang Duo often makes one very clear move here: either he lifts the upper section very high, or he presses the lower section very low, so that a strong difference opens inside the character. Once that difference appears, the character no longer looks as if it were simply written. It looks assembled—its upper part suspended, its lower part hanging, and the middle barely holding the two together. This feeling, dangerous yet slippery, slippery yet stable, is very much Wang Duo’s own.

The character lan (兰) is also wonderfully handled. If it is written too squarely, it becomes too elegant, and that elegance empties out. Wang Duo will not allow that. He often makes the upper part light and nimble, and the lower part broad and stretched—or does the reverse, pushing the lower section outward so that the whole character acquires a disproportion that is oddly charming. One may feel that it is “a little too much,” but that “too much” is precisely what saves it from being merely decorous and gives it a spark of wit.

The character de (得) is even more typical. It has many components and a complex internal relation. The hardest thing is to keep it clear without making it stiff. Wang Duo often exaggerates the proportions between upper and lower parts so that the character feels a little top-light and bottom-heavy, or tight above and loose below. Once that happens, the character takes on motion. It is like a person walking while turning back to answer someone. The pleasure here is not ornament. It is a mischievousness in rhythm.

In the end, humor in calligraphy is a matter of rhythm. It is not about what is written, but how it is written; not about semantic meaning, but about the posture of the character. In Wang Duo’s handling of these upper-and-lower forms, one comes very close to a kind of dangerousness with a smile in it. Not an open laugh, but a secret smile in brush and ink.

At this point one has to answer a basic question: why does exaggeration look affected in some hands, but convincing in Wang Duo’s?

The answer is simple enough. His exaggeration is not floating on the surface. It is built on bone structure.

The term gufa, or “bone method,” has become a bit overused today. The moment many people hear it, they think only of strong brush force. That is not enough. Bone method matters more as an internal relation. A character stands not because one stroke is especially heavy, but because a few key supports inside it have been built into place. However much Wang Duo exaggerates, he never loses that base.

In this work, many characters look crooked, shaky, ready to tumble out. Yet the true movement of the line, the hidden axes, and the handoff of force from stroke to stroke are all still there. Each character may have its own strange look, yet it still submits to the rhythm of the line. Each line may rise and fall, yet the whole work is still carried by one continuous current of energy. That is not casual eccentricity. It is the deliberate invention of a master.

And because bone structure supports it, the exaggeration never turns oily, coquettish, or shallow. It is interesting, but not superficial. It has a smile in it, but not a slippery one. It is like someone who has seen great occasions and deliberately tells a playful line, while the weight behind it still holds.

What Lies Behind Wang Duo’s Humor

Still, if one sees this piece only as “fun,” that too is not enough. Wang Duo’s sense of play was never a purely light one. There is always in his writing something of the late Ming remnant spirit, something shaped by the pressure of an age breaking apart. That is to say, his exaggeration is not only an aesthetic choice. It is also an outward form of inward structure.

Wang Duo lived through the Ming-Qing dynastic transition. That is the large historical background. When an age falls out of order, identities become unstable, values are rearranged. Even a man of great talent cannot live securely inside pure art alone. Under such conditions, calligraphy grows a very particular quality: outward flight, inward tension; outward extravagance, inward bitterness.

This inscription has that taste. It is not a mourning hand and not a hand of lament, yet it is no mere work of elegant ease either. There is in it a kind of alertness that feels as if it were written for the self to see. The characters are a little slippery, a little sly, a little deliberately reckless, but behind that lies a pressure that refuses to flatten out. That pressure keeps the humor from becoming light. There is a touch of self-mockery in it, and also a kind of grim endurance, and also a stubborn streak that says, “I will write it this way.”

That lifts it above ordinary playfulness. High humor is rarely pure cheer. More often, there is some sadness behind it. Wang Duo is exactly like that.

Today, when people talk about calligraphy, they often like to speak of “bearing,” “tradition,” and “discipline.” All of that is right. But one thing is often overlooked, and that is taste. Without taste, even the soundest discipline turns into dead rule. Without humor, even the highest technique can turn into a display of skill.

What is most worth learning from this work is not how one particular character is distorted, nor how one particular stroke is flung out. What matters is the way Wang Duo creates surprise inside rules, brings a smile into seriousness, and leaves human character inside form. That matters a great deal. Calligraphy is not a competition between writing machines. It is an activity of the spirit. If a person has no wit, no elasticity, no judgment with even the faintest smile in it, then the writing will rarely come fully alive.

From this angle, the danger in xi (羲), the exaggeration in Fu (芾), guan (观), fen (焚), wo (卧), fa (法), and xian (献), and the opening and closing in shen (深), lan (兰), and de (得) are not simply technical tricks. They are forms speaking through structure. Together they build a very distinct writing personality: one that refuses flatness, refuses evenness, refuses to arrange itself obediently by the rules, and yet always knows where the boundary lies.

That is Wang Duo’s brilliance.

What makes this Inscription for Mi Fu’s “Poem Written Aboard a Boat on the Wu River” endure is not how much grand-master aura it carries, nor how many startling poses it assumes. It is that it shows us that calligraphy does not have to be solemn only; it can have humor. It does not have to be regular only; it can also be playful. It does not have to merely “resemble”; it can also “live.”

And this humor is not cheap cleverness. It is not lightness for its own sake. It is a structural joke built on powerful control. It is a brush-and-ink sharpness built on deep tradition. It is that little streak of deliberate unruliness that a great calligrapher lets show on the paper.

That is precisely why this work is so interesting. It is not a famous relic to be worshipped from a distance. It is more like a living person standing on the paper, body tilted, brows raised, wearing a slight crooked smile, saying to later generations: if characters are written too obediently, they lose their charm.

Ren Jingjing

This running-script letter, written by Su Shi (苏轼) at the age of thirty-four, now rests quietly in the National Palace Museum in Taipei (台北故宫博物院). The sheet holds only eight lines, fewer than sixty characters in all, and measures no more than about twenty-five centimeters square. Yet it feels like an “early fragment” preserved from Northern Song calligraphy, fixing in place, on some spring afternoon in Bianjing (汴京), a Su Dongpo (苏东坡) who had not yet been struck hard by fate.

The date was around the fourth year of Xining (熙宁四年). Su Shi was in his early thirties, serving in Kaifeng (开封) as a Taichang Boshi (太常博士). He had already tasted frustration in politics, but he had not yet reached the life-and-death threshold of the “Crow Terrace Poetry Case” (乌台诗案). The struggle between the supporters of the New Policies and their opponents was already moving beneath the surface. He stood in the middle, unwilling to join a faction outright, yet unable to stop himself from speaking plainly in remonstrance. His career was not going smoothly. But in this letter, there is no bitterness and no anger. There is only courtesy, and a little joking ease, between friends.

The general sense of the letter is simple: it thanks a colleague for the gift of a “Lin’an incense box” (临安香合). An incense box was a desk object used to hold incense cakes or powdered incense. It was both an everyday article and an elegant plaything of the scholar-official class. In just a few lines, Su Shi not only acknowledges the gift but also praises it as “wonderfully fine.” The tone is light, with a trace of youthful spirit: he understands the forms, yet does not lose his ease. The letter says nothing about politics. It speaks only of an object and of feeling. That, in turn, shows another side of Su Shi’s daily life. Outside the tense air of court life, he still had the mind to look closely at the texture and shape of an incense vessel, and he was willing to take up the brush for this small pleasure.

That stands in sharp contrast to the later Su Dongpo. After exile, he wrote in his poems and prose of mountains and waters, of farming and village life, and of lines like “there are only a few idle men such as we two” (“但少闲人如吾两人耳”). That was the openness of spirit that came after catastrophe. In this early letter, by contrast, the pleasure is simpler. It belongs to a confident young official, someone with an instinctive appreciation for the details of life. Because the cast of mind is different, the air of the writing is also very different from the works of his Huangzhou (黄州) and Huizhou (惠州) years.

The Rules Still Hold, but the Self Style Has Begun to Rise

What is most compelling about this work is that it shows a key stage in Su Shi’s movement from “learning from the ancients” to “becoming himself.” In brushwork, structure, and layout, one can still see his respect for the discipline of Jin and Tang calligraphy. The central tip remains primary; turns are mostly rounded; the characters are inwardly tight and outwardly squared; the whole is stable. Yet on this same sheet, one also finds, everywhere, that later air of looseness that never loses inner strength.

The horizontal strokes do not aim at strict uniformity. Most have slight rises and falls, like ripples moving across water in the wind. The vertical strokes, by contrast, favor a somewhat slanting descent in centered brush. The stroke begins with a slight angle, lifts and presses a little at the middle, then closes with a tail that turns back ever so slightly. The turns are neither stiff and abrupt nor wholly smooth. They are “rounded, yet with an edge” (“圆中带棱”). They carry the warmth associated with the line of Wang Xizhi (王羲之), yet faintly reveal the bony force of Yan Zhenqing (颜真卿). In that sense, they are closer to the ideal of qiumei—“vigorous grace” (“遒媚”)—that Northern Song literati prized.

As for the layout, the eight lines are arranged vertically. The distance between one column and the next is not fully even. The spacing is deliberately looser in some places and tighter in others. A few characters are slightly enlarged, like someone naturally raising his voice in a crowd rather than making a show of emphasis. Taken as a whole, the center of gravity leans a little to the right, creating the feeling of a curtain stirring lightly in a breeze. There is nothing here of the almost collapsing, wildly unbridled layout seen in some late works. What one finds instead is a sense of order with measure, and with movement inside it.

The letter is brief, yet several common characters recur, among them an (安) and bu (不). Each time they appear, they are not mechanically repeated. The first an is a little broader in structure. Its roof spreads out, and the nü (女) beneath the radical is written with restraint, its waist slightly drawn in. The later an, by contrast, is clearly slimmer and longer, with its center of gravity set lower, giving it a settled, grounded feeling. The two sit in a single line without calling attention to themselves. But once one compares them, one sees how sensitive the writer was to rhythm. The same character, in a different setting, needs a different posture.

The changes in bu are even more obvious. In some cases, the top horizontal stroke is slightly longer, like an arm reaching out and naturally linking the neighboring characters. In others, it is deliberately shortened, which lets the lower vertical stroke stand more firmly. The whole character then resembles a small wedge driven upright, pinning the current of the line downward. These small shifts among the characters keep the entire piece alive to the eye. They avoid the stiffness of standard script, and they also avoid the looseness into which some running and cursive works can easily fall.

Then there are characters such as lin (临) and ji (即), where one can feel the writer testing possibilities of structure. In lin, the left-hand chen (臣) component is made especially prominent and written with great weight. On the right, the two upper dots are slightly drawn in, while the three mouths of the lower pin (品) do not seek perfect centering but are instead set with a gentle stagger. That gives the whole character a downward-pouring posture, which suits the spatial suggestion carried by lin in the phrase “Lin’an incense box.” In ji, the vertical stroke of the right-hand jie (卩) is written lower, like a slanting post driven into the ground. The form thus extends toward the lower right and strengthens the sense of forward motion across the line. These small structural revisions to ordinary characters show that Su Shi was no longer content merely to imitate model books. He was already treating each character as an act of “re-creation.”

From the Two Wangs to the “Su Style”: Inheritance and Turning Point

Throughout his life, Su Shi’s copying and study were centered on the “Two Wangs” (二王)—Wang Xizhi and Wang Xianzhi (王献之)—but he also drew on Ouyang Xun (欧阳询), Yan Zhenqing, and others. His sources were broad and mixed. In this letter, the shadow of the Two Wangs is still clear. In many characters, the opening and closing of the brush are linked by threads with the feel of running-cursive script. The horizontal strokes often return slightly at the end as they move forward, a manner close to what one sees in model texts such as the Preface to the Orchid Pavilion (Lanting xu 兰亭序). Now and then, one also finds the slender verticals that recall the airy elegance of Wang Xianzhi.

Yet to see this simply as a lingering style from the Two Wangs would be to underestimate Su Shi’s originality. Compared with Huang Tingjian (黄庭坚) and Mi Fu (米芾), his near contemporaries, Su’s writing contains less deliberate strangeness and more naturalness born of temperament. Huang liked to twist structure dramatically. Mi pursued danger and force in the movement of the brush. What Su Shi shows in this letter is something else: a suppressed humor, and a lightness of feeling. The forms are at times slightly exaggerated, yet they never steal the scene. They always serve the rise and fall of the letter’s tone as a whole.

That is the seed of what later generations would call the “Po style” (“坡体”). Later copyists of Su often learned only the looseness. They did not learn this sense of measure. Many imitations keep enlarging the slant, the tilt, the linked exaggeration, yet forget the almost severe control of stroke one sees in this letter. Every stroke is in place. Every turn has its reason. Even the most casual connecting thread takes on exactly the task of linking a phrase or shifting the breath of the line.

If one compares this letter with Su Shi’s later masterpieces, such as the Cold Food Observance Poems from Huangzhou (Huangzhou Hanshi shijuan 黄州寒食诗卷) and the inscriptions to Bamboo and Rock in Xiaoxiang (Xiaoxiang zhushi tu tiba 潇湘竹石图题跋), two sharply different temperaments come into view. His late writing is often described as marked by “dry brush” (“枯笔”) and “slanting forms” (“欹侧”). The movement of the lines runs crosswise and vertical in a bold sweep. The ink changes dramatically from wet to dry. At times he even seems to break the strokes on purpose, refusing a rounded close and leaving streaks of “flying white” (“飞白”), giving the writing the force of old trees and withered vines. That is the image of a life after exile and illness.

This letter from the age of thirty-four is something else. The ink tone is even. The strokes are full. The turns are rounded. One sees almost none of the deliberately made dryness or perilous extremity of the later hand. The lines carry a slight plump richness, but they are never bloated. They are like wine just beginning to mature: the fragrance is already there, yet it has not grown fierce enough to burn the throat. Some viewers prefer Su Shi at this stage, and that does not mean they reject the greatness of his late peak. It means they find here a rare balance: the ease proper to literati calligraphy, still joined to the discipline and restraint laid down in early training.

One can also understand the difference through state of mind. After Huangzhou, Su Shi was confronting fate even as he consciously sought in calligraphy to “let awkwardness triumph over skill” (“以拙胜巧”). He moved away from finish and exact polish, turning toward an aesthetic that almost “damages beauty.” In his old age he said that calligraphy need not strive after craft; what matters is the capturing of intent. This early letter of thanks stands at the other end. It has not yet fully moved toward the breaking of rules. It is still seeking freedom from within discipline. For later viewers, that condition—hovering between restraint and release—is in some ways even better suited to close looking.

Rethinking “Beauty” and “Peak Achievement”

From the standpoint of calligraphy, this work has already completed, in essential form, the framework of the “Po style.” Stroke by stroke, it is fully in hand. Its character structures are distinctly its own, yet they still carry the deep shadow of tradition. Compared with the expansiveness of the late works, it is warmer, more elegant, and softer in beauty. It is also better suited to long, patient comparison. In the full lineage of Su Shi’s calligraphic production, it may not be the highest summit, but it is certainly a key piece in understanding the evolution of his style and the movement of his inner life.

Later generations usually treat the period after Huangzhou as the high point of Su Shi’s calligraphy. That is a judgment made from the perspective of art history. But if one speaks only of what is visually beautiful, many viewers may well prefer these letters from before middle age. The reason is not hard to see. In the late hand, pain and desolation are written directly into the line. It is a beauty that presses upon the viewer, and it takes time, along with knowledge of his life, to read it fully. This early letter about the incense box is closer to the kind of beauty ordinary experience recognizes at once: warm, open, and a pleasure to behold.

Seen in the long history of calligraphy, that kind of beauty is not cheap ornament. It is a rare state of balance. It proves that Su Shi was entirely capable of writing running script that was both disciplined and elegant within the bounds of inherited form. His later turn toward a rougher, even “uglier,” mode was an active aesthetic choice, not the result of weakened skill. Precisely because one has seen that he could write like this, one can return to the Cold Food Observance Poems from Huangzhou and better understand the courage it took to break beauty on purpose and use dry brush to write the cracks of a life.

If one judges with a critic’s eye, this letter can be called an “early-ripened fruit” among Su Shi’s youthful works. Its strengths are clear. First, the brushwork is clean and decisive. It does not drag or hesitate. The horizontal strokes, verticals, left-falling strokes, and right-falling strokes all show real command. There is none of the floating weakness often seen in young calligraphers, and none of the slackness that can appear in later years. Every stroke seems thought through, yet still preserves the improvisatory life of the moment of writing.

Second, the structure is natural. It does not strain after novelty or deliberately court danger, nor does it fall into the stiffness of formal court style. The repeated characters are varied with tact. Their sizes rise and fall in a pleasing way, so that these eight short lines still present themselves with real depth and order.

Third, the balance between feeling and force is especially good. One does not find the pressure and violent release of the Cold Food Observance Poems from Huangzhou. Nor does one find the constraint and caution visible in some formal memorials and official notes. The whole work feels like the natural conversation of a man in front of a good friend: unguarded, yet never overassertive.

Still, by a higher standard, the piece also has its limits. The layout still depends heavily on vertical unfolding. It lacks the open horizontal depth one sees in the great long scrolls of later years. The spacing between some lines is slightly conservative. The hand has not yet fully released that impulse toward free and ample sweep. In that sense, the work shows both the maturity of Su Shi’s technique and the fact that, aesthetically, he was still in a period of compromise. He would not wholly submit to old rules, but he had not yet thrown himself open to the full rise and fall of his own feeling.

A Thousand Years Later, Looking Again at This Letter

The letter speaks of an incense box, of friendship, and of fragrance rising from the desk. This kind of subject can easily sink into social routine. Yet Su Shi gives it a visual life. The language is simple, but one can still imagine a spring day in Bianjing, incense burning before the writing table, a friend presenting a small incense box, and the quiet pleasure of the recipient unfolding the letter.

Here, writing and content enter into a subtle accord. The characters are somewhat slim and long, and the spacing between lines is slightly loose, like incense smoke curling upward. The ink tone is moderate, neither too dark nor too pale. There is no piling up of heavy ink. Instead, large spaces of breathing room remain on the sheet. This sense of blankness corresponds to the invisible quality of fragrance and gives the letter its distinctive atmosphere. It is not ritual writing, nor is it an official memorial. It is the look of ordinary life’s “idle pleasure” (“闲情”) being taken seriously.

From this angle, one can see that even in his early years Su Shi already possessed the most important gift of literati calligraphy: the ability to quietly write the emotion of the subject itself into the line and into the spacing of the page. In later works such as the Red Cliff Fu (Chibi fu 赤壁赋) and the Cold Food Poems (Hanshi shi 寒食诗), he would carry that much farther. But this little letter about an incense box is already a complete rehearsal.

To look again at this running-script letter today is to see that it is not only an individual work. It is also a small image of the larger culture of Northern Song literati calligraphy. An incense box on the desk, exchanges among friends, the swirl of official life—these things interweave to form an everyday scene from an age. In this moment, Su Shi’s brush preserves that everyday texture for later generations. Between the lines one sees both the courtesy proper to the scholar-official class and the quickness of an individual temperament, both the lingering aftertone of Jin and Tang and the first signs of literati calligraphy in the Yuan, Ming, and Qing.

In the broader picture of art history, this work is like a hidden but crucial tributary. From it one can look back toward the more restrained Su Shi of earlier years, and forward toward the surging long scrolls of the post-Huangzhou period. For scholars, it offers a rare point of reference. Here one can see clearly how, after mastering technique, Su Shi gradually turned “writing characters” into “writing himself.”

For an ordinary viewer, the meaning of this letter is not abstract either. Standing before the glass case and looking at those eight lines of unhurried ink, it is easy to feel a small illusion come over the mind: as if the writer were not far from the present at all, as if he had only stepped out for a moment to drink with a friend, while the incense box still sat on the desk and the ash in the burner had not yet gone cold. That sense of nearness is precisely the charm of Su Shi’s running script. It does not rely on grand subject matter or on deliberate poses. It allows a brief letter to remain warm, even after a thousand years.

If one thinks of Su Shi’s life as a long novel, this letter thanking someone for an incense box is only a small and almost unnoticed passage. Yet it is just such seemingly minor fragments that make up the real Su Dongpo: a man pushed about by the tides of politics, and at the same time a lover of life, someone who would write with delight over a single incense vessel or a single wisp of fragrance.

A thousand years later, these fifty-nine characters in eight lines have yellowed with the paper, and the ink, too, has dimmed somewhat. Yet that smiling confidence and easy poise are still plainly there. It is in that sense that this small running-script letter is not only a relic. It is also an unfinished conversation, still going on in paper and ink, speaking slowly to all who stand before it later—about writing, about life, and about how, in the midst of changing fortune, one might still keep a little of one’s own style.

Ren Jingjing（任晶晶）

The worst way to read Su Shi’s（苏轼）letters is to treat them as “works to be hung in a gallery.” They were never written for that. They were the words daily life forced him to put on paper: inquiries, replies, requests, thanks, assurances of safety, talk of people and affairs. The paper is small. The matters are many. The feeling is even heavier.

It is precisely because these letters do not pose for show that we can see the ground tone of Northern Song（北宋）literati calligraphy more clearly. Calligraphy is not a “specialized performance of skill.” It is part of life. It is an instant image of character and circumstance pressed onto paper.

These two pieces, Letter on Receiving Your Messenger (《人来得书帖》) and New Year’s Greetings (《新岁展庆帖》), are both very typical examples of Su Shi’s “everyday state” within his running-regular script system (行楷). The characters do not carry the tired air of being “deliberately pretty.” They are “truly written” at every turn.

When we put them back into their original everyday setting, and then read them in contrast with Huang Tingjian（黄庭坚）, Mi Fu（米芾）, and Cai Xiang（蔡襄）, we can see the strengths of Su Shi’s calligraphy and also its weak spots. More important, the lesson they hold for us today is not mysterious at all: calligraphy needs to live again from its first principles—characters that are usable, durable to look at, and able to carry feeling.

He Is Not Writing “Calligraphy” But Writing “Human Ties and Everyday Life”

Letter on Receiving Your Messenger is about grief and helplessness in the shock of sudden death. The emotion of this letter is very focused.

In outline, the letter says this: a messenger has brought a letter; from it Su learns that a friend (someone connected with “Jichang,” 季常) has suddenly passed away; he is stunned and grieved. The dead man had both talent and character. His kindness was still unpaid, and now he is gone. Su then thinks of the family burden left behind, of the children, and feels that those who survive suffer even more. He urges the recipient to restrain his sorrow and to understand that life and death, meetings and partings, are part of the usual order. Yet he cannot persuade his own pain. At the end he mentions that he cannot go in person to offer condolences, and can only pour wine as a libation from afar. When he comes to this point, he can barely hold his feelings in.

This kind of content is not unfamiliar today. On the one hand, we know “people must part in the end.” On the other, we still think, “How did things reach this point so quickly?” This is not a philosophical essay. It is the pain of the moment at the pit of the stomach.

And because it is not written to “put on show,” the center of gravity of the characters is naturally pulled by what is being said. Where they need to pause, they pause. Where they need to rush, they rush. Emotion goes first. Brush and ink follow.

New Year’s Greetings is about New Year wishes, repairs to a house, and the exchange of gifts. Unlike Letter on Receiving Your Messenger, this letter speaks in another tone. It opens with New Year greetings, wishing the other party smoothness in all things. Su then asks whether their health and everyday life have been well.

In the middle he talks about repair work on a house, plans for going into the city, and other daily arrangements. He notes that he has received letters from others and roughly says when he might arrive. Then he writes that he himself has not been able to go out, and so he is entrusting someone to send over some items first (the letter mentions things like oleaster fruit and decorative letter paper—plain gifts for daily use). He also says he wants to borrow some Jianzhou tea and osmanthus, elegant goods of the time. He even speaks of asking the recipient to “take this as a sample and buy another piece over there,” a very concrete and homely instruction.

At the close, he comes back to the cold of the season and earnestly asks the other person to take care. He signs off with respectful bows and notes that he is writing on the second day of the first month.

One letter is cold, one is warm; one mourns a death, one blesses the New Year. What they share is clear: the writing exists to keep relationships alive, to make things clear, and to hand over feeling. The characters are “only” the vehicle, yet because they carry “relationship and reality,” they come closer to the core of calligraphy.

If we look at letters as “calligraphic works,” we miss the function they truly serve. When Su Shi writes a letter, he is not engaged in “artistic creation.” He is doing three much more concrete things.

First, he is maintaining relationships. In the Northern Song scholar-official world, information and feeling both flowed heavily through letters. Greetings, thanks, mourning, requests—all of these had to be settled in brush and ink on a single sheet. When the characters go out, the relationship is still moving.

Second, he is handling business. In New Year’s Greetings, the repairs, the sending of things, the borrowing of tea, the entrusting of errands are all acts of everyday management. Calligraphy is the “tool of execution” here.

Third, he is settling his own emotions. In Letter on Receiving Your Messenger, that conflict between “knowing the rule of life and death” and “still grieving” is itself a kind of inner tangle. Writing it out is a way of sorting himself. Only when the words are finished on paper can the heart fall back to the ground, if only a little.

Taken together, these three functions point us to one conclusion: in that time, calligraphy and life were not separate. Unless specifically asked, few people “wrote characters purely to show skill.” What we now call “work-consciousness” is largely a later way of looking. These two letters of Su Shi happen to let today’s readers see again that calligraphy, at its origin, was not meant to be “beautiful” first of all. It was meant to “connect people with the world.”

Running Script as Writing That Can Carry the Everyday Life

When people talk about Su Shi’s letters, they often fall into the cliché of calling them “natural” and “spontaneous.” The words are not wrong. A more reliable way, though, is to break this down into things we can actually observe: brushwork, structure of characters, flow of the line, overall layout, and ink tone.

Brushwork first. His main bone is the upright brush (中锋); force enters from the side (侧入); the lifting and pressing of the brush is not exaggerated. In both letters, you can see Su Shi’s basic habit: the brush core stays collected; the starts and finishes do not show off.

Many horizontal strokes start with a light entry, travel a little, press slightly, then lift again. At the end he rarely draws out the sharp, “deliberately pointed” tip. He more often lets the stroke run out with its own energy. Vertical strokes and diagonals likewise do not try to “tear the paper open.” Most of the time, they “just pass through.” This produces a very “Su” feeling: he does not grab at you; he holds his ground and keeps pushing forward.

Look closely at the turns and corners. You often see “square inside roundness” (方中带圆). Where he must turn, he turns firmly, but he does not pretend to sharp angles. Where he curves, he curves steadily and without slickness. This way of handling the brush suits letters especially well. The speed is allowed. The feeling is allowed. But he does not allow himself to write as if he were on a stage showing off. So the strokes have both speed and restraint.

In the structure of characters, his centers of gravity are often slightly off, which in fact brings out the human presence. He does not seek “every character sitting straight.” Many characters lean a little to the left or right. Some are tighter on top and looser at the bottom, or closed on one side and opened on the other. By “academy standards,” people might even call them “scattered.”

Yet this is exactly the truth of letters. He is writing words, and words have weight and tempo. The characters follow the words.

What matters more is that Su Shi’s “tilt” is not collapse. It is “liveliness.” The characters do not fall down. Instead they stand as if a person were speaking: sometimes leaning forward, sometimes turning back, sometimes pausing. In this kind of structure, the more you look, the more it holds. Each character carries a bit of concrete situation, not an empty shell.

The flow of the line is not a parade but a breath. In both pieces the flow along each line is very strong. Here “strong” does not mean uniform. It means continuous. The links between characters rely much on the lingering force of the brush. The previous character does not end in a dead stop. The next does not begin with a hard start. There is always a pocket of air between them. The breath does not break, and so the line moves through.

Seen as a whole, the writing looks like “someone walking across the paper,” not “characters standing in ranks.”

In Letter on Receiving Your Messenger, the flow of the lines is more broken and turned. Words of grief bring changes in pace. Some lines are more urgent. Some places press down more heavily. Emotion makes the flow rise and fall, the way speech sometimes catches in the throat and yet must go on.

In New Year’s Greetings, the lines are more even. Greetings, requests, the sending of items—these are continuous acts in daily life. So the characters are looser, the lines more level. Where he speeds up once or twice, it is like remembering some detail in mid-conversation and adding it along the way.

As for overall layout, spacing and density are tuned by the logic of what is being said. The worst mistake in reading letters is to measure their layout by the rules of “gallery works.” Su’s spacing is, most of the time, not designed in advance. It is driven by content. When he reaches a crucial point, the writing grows somewhat denser. When he moves into narrative, it relaxes. At the end, in the closing courtesies and signature, things draw in again.

This kind of layout “following the text” is one of the most common compositional habits in Chinese calligraphy, and one of the easiest for modern viewers to forget. It was not written for exhibition. It was written to make the words clear.

The ink tones do not chase layered variation, which brings them closer to daily use. In both letters the ink tone is rather simple. You do not see the later, stage-like effect of “dry and wet set against one another.” The reason is simple. In everyday letter-writing, ink does not need tricks. It only needs to be legible, durable, and fit for transmission. Precisely because the ink is not “performing,” the eye returns to the force of the brush and the flow of the line, and from there, back to the state of the person.

With Su Shi’s Letter on Receiving Your Messenger and New Year’s Greetings, we do not need to cover up shortcomings, nor do we need to turn them into myths. Each has its own “strengths” and “weaknesses.”

Their strengths are:

· Emotion and brush are joined. Feeling, tone, and rhythm all find echoes in the brushwork and the line. The writing does not turn the characters into decorations detached from their content.

· The upright brush is steady; the flow is long. It does not win by tricks. It holds the whole piece together with stability and continuity.

· The character structures are lively and human. They are not standardized “proper forms,” but a felt “aliveness.” They stand up to repeated viewing and repeated reading.

· The layout grows out of the text. Spacing is driven by the content, which fits the real logic of letters.

Their weaknesses are:

· The looseness has clear edges. Once he writes faster, some characters may become so loose that their forms no longer fully gather, and he has to rely on the overall flow to pull them back together.

· The strokes are not fully polished. Some turns are not carefully tidied. Seen up close, they can feel “rough.” This is the cost of everyday writing.

· The visual stimulus is not strong. To readers used to “showpiece calligraphy,” it is easy to underestimate how difficult and how dense these letters really are.

These “weaknesses” should not be used to deny Su Shi. On the contrary, they remind us of something: the criteria for judging letter-calligraphy should never be completely identical with those used for exhibition works. The first measure here is “truthful, fluent, legible, and able to carry feeling.” Under that standard, these two letters of Su Shi bring out something essential in calligraphy.

Compared with Huang, Mi, and Cai: Strengths and Shortcomings in Contrast

Within the framework of the “Four Masters of the Song,” people often say that Su is “the ancestor of calligraphy that privileges intention.” We can keep that line, but we need to lay it onto the surface of the paper, or it will float empty.

Compared with Huang Tingjian, Huang is more severe; Su is more thick and full. Huang’s characters often show “bones on the outside.” His structures are perilous and strained, like long spears and great halberds. His lifts, presses, and turns are more deliberately worked, as if he were pulling the sinews and bones out onto the stage.

In these two letters, Su is more “thick.” The thickness lies in not flaunting the bones, in hiding bone within flesh. His force does not rely on sharpness, but on the sustained flow of the line and the steady upright brush. So he looks calmer, more like speaking in everyday tones.

The shortcoming is also here. Huang’s “risk” produces a strong structural tension. In the state of letters, Su easily appears “loose.” Loosen too far, and the structure of some characters is not tight enough; certain strokes begin to drag. This is not a disaster, but it is a matter of degree. If you loosen all the way, the breath will disperse.

Compared with Mi Fu, Mi is faster and stranger; Su is steadier and plainer. Mi’s famous “brushed characters” move with great speed and leap. They are eccentric and ever-changing, tilting and turning, and their ink play is often dramatic. Su, in these two letters, clearly does not take that road. Su’s strangeness lies not in “oddness,” but in “truth.” Truth pushed to its limit becomes flavor. Mi is like wind. Su is like earth. Wind can astonish. Earth can support.

The shortcoming is again obvious. Mi’s sharpness and variation give a stronger hit to the eye. Su, in the everyday state of letters, does not seek this stimulation. So visually there are fewer “high points.” For eyes trained on “exhibition calligraphy,” it is easy to think his writing “not exciting enough.” The problem is not Su. It lies in our habit of looking.

Compared with Cai Xiang, Cai is more refined and orderly; Su is more open and unrestrained. Cai’s letters are often warm and neat, with implicit discipline and more carefully worked detail. These two letters of Su are more like conversation, less like models prepared for later ages. Cai’s strength is “reliability.” Su’s strength is “life.” Cai rarely slips. Su, in writing quickly, is more likely to produce an occasional “ragged edge.” Yet it is also Su who is more likely to write “the person” into the characters.

Contemporary Calligraphy Ought to Return to Its First Principles

In these two letters, there is a root of calligraphy and a root of human feeling.

The grief and helplessness of Letter on Receiving Your Messenger, the greetings, entrusting, and courtesy of New Year’s Greetings—taken together, they form the everyday world of Su Shi. In this space, calligraphy is not “added value.” It is the tool by which daily life runs, and it is the way feeling lands. Precisely because calligraphy and life are tightly bound together, we can still read out the taste of living, and we can still read out the warmth of character.

I believe this is the most basic first principle of Chinese calligraphy. We should not think first of “does it look like this or that style” or “is it marvelous.” We should think first, “How should these words go out onto the paper? How should this feeling settle on the page?”

Characters should be able to link people to one another. They should be able to tie people to their time. They should be able to set down the movements of the heart. Once this is done, skill is naturally within, and style will naturally appear.

When we talk about calligraphy today, there are two common distortions. One is to treat calligraphy as a “visual spectacle,” to rely on exaggerated contrasts of dry and wet, enormous formats, and dense symbols to manufacture effect. The other is to treat calligraphy as a “retro craft,” asking only for resemblance to some master or some famous piece, even if the resemblance is only that of a copy.

Both paths tend to pull calligraphy out of life. Calligraphy first needs to return to “the accumulation of daily practice.” Su’s looseness, thickness, and steadiness did not come from copying one or two model letters. They came from writing at length, using writing constantly, and letting it be ground by life over time.

These two letters of Su Shi suggest this to us:

Calligraphy must first be able to carry real relationships. It should be clear whom you are writing to, why you are writing, and what you are writing. Once these three are clear, brush and ink will find their places.

Calligraphy must first serve expression. When it needs steadiness, it steadies. When it needs speed, it speeds up. When it needs to gather, it gathers. When it needs to open, it opens. Not every single character has to be “beautiful,” but the whole piece must “go through.”

Calligraphy must first return to being “readable.” The value of a letter lies in the fact that you can read it straight through. Only when you can read it do “rhythm” and “tone” come into play.

If contemporary calligraphy really wants to “return,” the key does not lie in performance or exhibition. It lies in the path we choose: to put calligraphy back into the scenes of life and let it again take on the work of communication, record, and emotional sorting.

If we write little, it is easy to turn writing into “a stage.” If we write a lot, if we write to real people about real matters, then we begin to write our own face into the page.

If contemporary calligraphy can still learn something from these two letters of Su Shi, it is not how to imitate “the Su style,” but how calligraphy can return to living inside human life. Once this path is opened, tradition does not need slogans, and innovation does not need posturing. Calligraphy will live on its own.

Lai Xueyou’s latest semi-cursive scroll unfolds like a conversation between antiquity and contemporary sensibility—each column of ink on the vivid turquoise ground bearing the weight of centuries-old practice while also gesturing toward unexpected breaths of individual freedom. From the outset, one senses the work’s conscious dialogue with Tang and Song running-script traditions: vertical strokes bear the imprint of Yan Zhenqing’s grave strength, hooks and turns echo Wang Xizhi’s refined dynamism, and lighter, feathered edges recall the spirited spontaneity of Mi Fu. Yet this is no mere pastiche. Instead, Lai calibrates these familiar models into a voice that is peculiarly his own, forging a balance between restraint and expressive release that animates each character in turn.

His brushwork exemplifies a command of weight and modulation that only decades of disciplined practice can yield. The interplay of press-and-lift—thick, solemn strokes giving way to thinner, more translucent passages—carries an almost musical rhythm, reminiscent of breathing itself. At moments when the brush is fully loaded, the ink sinks into the fibrous paper with palpable gravity; elsewhere, as the tip dances lightly, it leaves a web of dry-brush texture, suggesting movement rather than stillness. Such contrasts are never gratuitous. They serve to establish a cadence across each line, guiding the viewer’s eye through rises and falls that feel both inevitable and surprising.

Character structure is another arena in which Lai’s lineage and innovation converge. In well-balanced forms with a clear central axis, radicals distribute themselves with harmonious proportion, neither too tight nor too dispersed. In more complex characters—those bearing five or six strokes of varying orientation—the composition avoids clutter by subordinating secondary strokes to the primary spine, allowing the eye to register the principal gesture before exploring subsidiary details. Only in a few isolated instances does one detect a slight over-compression—where two densely interwoven elements brush too close, briefly disrupting the work’s otherwise generous sense of space. These moments, however, are rare and serve more as reminders of the challenge inherent in sustaining structural spaciousness across a long scroll than as indictments of technical failure.

Perhaps most striking is Lai’s handling of overall layout, or zhangfa, which reveals an intuitive sense of pacing seldom encountered outside the most accomplished masters. The spacing between columns neither rigidly uniform nor recklessly varied, but calibrated to produce alternations of tension and repose. Some columns crowd the eye, their characters spilling en masse, while others breathe more deeply, their emptier intervals inviting reflection. This ebb and flow creates a visual tempo that feels akin to musical phrasing, as if one were listening to a slow adagietto punctuated by sudden accelerandi. According to exhibition records from the Seventh Guangdong “Nanya Award” Calligraphy and Seal Carving Exhibition, Lai’s work has repeatedly drawn the jurors’ attention for precisely this mastery of spatial music—an acknowledgment that places him among the province’s most respected practitioners.

Critics writing about his earlier pieces have likewise noted this gift for compositional drama. At the Sixth Guangdong Province “Dali Cup” Calligraphy and Seal Carving Exhibition, commentary highlighted how Lai negotiates the boundary between controlled structure and gestural abandon—a duality that gives his lines both solidity and surprise. Across his body of work, one sees a steadily evolving approach to line density: earlier scrolls leaned more heavily on even regularity, while recent works deepen contrast and introduce more pronounced moments of visual counterpoint. In the present piece, those evolutions culminate in a sophistication that feels both assured and still willing to explore new tensions.

Underlying all these technical achievements is a stylistic temperament that privileges clarity over flamboyance—a commitment to disciplined elegance that resonates with principles articulated in recent discussions of calligraphy criticism. As Li Xinling observes, “the task of calligraphy critique is not to drown the reader in ornamental language, but to guide understanding of the work’s fundamental integrity” . Lai’s own restraint—his reluctance to resort to flashy exaggerations—aligns with this ethos. Even when the brush arcs in a sweeping flourish, the gesture never tips into ostentation; instead, it remains tethered to the scroll’s larger structural logic, as though every expressive impulse is counterbalanced by an inner monitor of compositional coherence.

Yet this very discipline can be double-edged. In a few passages, the cumulative regularity of stroke weight and spacing produces a sense of safe predictability. One wonders what might emerge were Lai to introduce more dramatic ruptures—perhaps a single column of deliberately oversized characters, or a sudden shift into extreme dry-brush austerity. Given his track record of absorbing classical models, it is likely he could integrate such departures without fracturing the overall harmony. Indeed, his willingness to evolve is evident in online discussions among calligraphy enthusiasts, where forum posts have praised his readiness to experiment with brush angle and paper grain. Allowing these experiments to take bolder forms may be the next frontier in his artistic growth.

Another dimension ripe for refinement lies in the transitions of ink tone. At present, heavy black sometimes gives way to light gray with a discernible jolt—an effect that captures attention, but not always for the right reasons. A more gradual fade, achieved through subtler adjustments of ink dilution and brush pressure, could heighten the scroll’s atmospheric quality. In sections where the darkest strokes dissipate too abruptly, the eye is jarred rather than gently led. By extending the middle ground of medium-tone gray, Lai could weave a more seamless continuum from the work’s densest points to its most ethereal moments.

The signature seal and colophon, placed at the margin with careful deliberation, contribute a final, punctuation-like flourish. The cinnabar red of the seal offers a vibrant counterpoint to the black-and-turquoise palette, anchoring the scroll’s visual weight without encroaching on the written text. Its placement, neither too central nor too marginal, suggests that Lai regards the seal as an integral musical motif rather than an afterthought. This approach to seal carving and placement has been cited in provincial award bulletins as exemplary in balancing identity and unity—another accolade that underscores the breadth of his technical and aesthetic achievements.

Stepping back, one sees in Lai Xueyou’s work not just the sum of brush-stroke mastery or compositional savvy, but the imprint of a mind deeply attuned to calligraphy’s dual nature as both craft and meditative practice. Each stroke records a moment of physical engagement—of wrist, elbow, and shoulder moving in concert—while also capturing a fleeting state of mind. This unity of body and spirit is what gives the best calligraphy its ineffable quality, and Lai’s scroll carries that quality in ample measure.

To push further along this path, he might consider embracing controlled unpredictability. Moments of intentional imbalance—an unexpected tilt here, an abrupt pause there—can awaken the viewer’s attention in unprecedented ways. Experimenting with paper textures or ground colors beyond the current turquoise might also open new dialogues between ink and substrate, challenging assumptions about background neutrality. Finally, further refining the gradations of ink tonality will create an even richer matrix of light and shadow, deepening the scroll’s capacity to convey mood as well as form.

In sum, Lai Xueyou stands at a vantage point where tradition and innovation converge. His latest semi-cursive scroll confirms his status as a mature calligraphic artist—one whose technical prowess and aesthetic discernment have been recognized by prestigious provincial exhibitions and online commentary alike. At the same time, the work hints at future possibilities: the exhilarating tensions that await between the known envelopes of classical form and the uncharted territories of personal expressiveness. Should Lai choose to navigate those tensions with the same calm assurance that has brought him this far, his calligraphy may well chart new courses for the art form itself—proving once again that to breathe between antiquity and modern aesthetics is to inhabit the living heart of calligraphy.

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Ren Jingjing (任晶晶)

In one volume of Songxian Shuhan (《宋贤书翰》) at the National Palace Museum in Taipei, there is an inconspicuous scrap of small characters. On the attached label someone wrote, “The brushwork of this prescription shows it is by Huang Shangu.” The piece is less than a single page, ink on paper, about twenty-eight centimeters high and thirty-seven centimeters wide, nine lines of running-cursive script, roughly eighty characters in all. The content is extremely trivial. It is neither poem nor prose, but only instructions for preparing a formula called “Infant Fragrance” (Yingxiangfang 婴香方).

Within the vast body of Huang Tingjian’s (黄庭坚) surviving works, titles such as Songfengge shi (《松风阁诗》), Lianpo Lin Xiangru zhuan (《廉颇蔺相如传》), and Huaxi xunren tie (《花气薰人帖》) are long familiar to readers, while Yingxiangfang Tie (《婴香方帖》) is often treated as a kind of incidental illustration. Many beginners only know that “Huang Tingjian once wrote out a prescription,” without really looking at how the characters are formed, much less linking this piece to his famously “eccentric and contorted” running script.

Yet it is precisely because this text feels “too everyday” that it pulls a deified calligrapher back to the writing desk. What appears is a middle-aged man, jotting down a recipe by lamplight, brush in hand, recalling the proportions as he writes. Halfway through he realizes he has misremembered something and makes corrections in the text; at the end he adds a line, “This is roughly what I remember. When I find the notebook to check it, if there is any difference, I will copy it out again.” This is not the “Huang Shangu” who hangs in a gallery, but Huang Tingjian as he lived from day to day. To understand this small work in semi-formal script, one has to look at the handwriting, and also at the “prescription.”

“Saint of Fragrance” Huang Tingjian: from Words to Scents

Huang Tingjian was not only a Northern Song calligrapher. He was also someone with a special interest in the culture of incense. An article from the Nanhai Museum (南海博物馆) says that he “made certain incense formulas into bestsellers,” and that later generations even regarded him as a kind of “saint of fragrance.”

In Xiangpu (《香谱》), compiled by the Song writer Hong Chu (洪芻), there are many notes on Huang Tingjian’s exchanges and experiments with blended incense. Other texts, such as Xiangshuo (《香说》) and Xiangpu shiyi (《香谱拾遗》), state more explicitly that the Infant Fragrance formula appears in the Daoist classic Zhengao (《真诰》), and that scholars and officials later kept revising and circulating it. Huang Tingjian was both a poet and a hands-on maker and judge of incense blends, standing at the center of this cultural line.

Over the course of his life, Huang was demoted again and again, and spent long periods in the damp heat of river and lake regions and the far south—in Jiangzhou, Fuzhou, Qianzhou and other places, none of them comfortable postings. Talk of miasma reflects its time, but epidemics, humidity, and mosquitoes were in fact serious local problems. Infant Fragrance, with its emphasis on “warding off miasma, removing foul odors, and clearing the head,” suits exactly this kind of environment.

Seen in this light, Yingxiangfang Tie does not record abstract pharmacological theory. It is a distillation of daily experience: how, in an unfavorable climate, to use a limited set of aromatics to blend a well-balanced scent that pleases the senses and also has a modest health effect. Phrases in the note such as “This is roughly what I remember” and “When I find the notebook to check it” hint at how often he used such blends. One only forms the habit of “writing out a draft from memory first” when one does this kind of work all the time.

Based on the transcriptions provided by the National Palace Museum and by various calligraphy and museum websites, the full text of Yingxiangfang Tie is as follows:

Infant Fragrance. Take three liang of ground jiaochén (aloeswood), four qian of ground dingxiang (cloves), seven qian of longnao (borneol) ground separately, three qian of shexiang (musk) ground separately, and one qian of zhi gongjia xiang (prepared甲香) ground. Grind everything together until even. Add half a liang of yaxiao ( refined saltpeter) and grind again until even. Add six liang of refined honey and mix until even. Store in the shade for one month, then take it out and roll it into pills about the size of a chicken’s head. This is roughly what I remember. When I find the notebook to check it, if there is any difference, I will copy it out again.

This is a typical Song-dynasty recipe for blended incense. The so-called “Infant Fragrance” appears in later works on incense such as Xiangpu (《香谱》) and Xiangcheng (《香乘》), and was a rather fashionable and costly incense pill at the time.

Every ingredient in the formula is a heavy-hitting aromatic. Jiaochén, a type of aloeswood, is warm in nature, enters the channels of the spleen, stomach, and kidneys, regulates qi and eases pain, and is a top-grade incense material with a deep, steady scent. Dingxiang, or clove, warms the center and descends rebellious qi, dispels cold and relieves pain, and in incense formulas combines medicinal and spicy fragrance. Longnao—today usually called bingpian, or borneol—has a penetrating scent that “opens the orifices” and clears the mind. Shexiang, or musk, is intensely active and dispersing; even a trace helps bring out the scent of the blend and is also a traditional “orifice-opening” drug. Jiā xiāng, which appears in sources as “prepared jiaxiang” or “gongjia xiang,” is identified differently in modern scholarship but is generally classed as another aromatic. Yaxiao, or refined saltpeter, is a mineral drug; here it mainly aids burning, penetration, and harmonizing. Refined honey binds the ingredients together and softens their penetrating and pungent qualities so that they can be formed into pills.

The Jiangsu Museum of Traditional Chinese Medicine (江苏中医药博物馆) summarizes the function of this formula as follows: “Made by blending jiaochén, dingxiang, longnao, shexiang, jiaxiang, yaxiao, and refined honey, it can ward off miasma, remove foul odors, and clear the head.” In other words, it is not a “prescription drug” aimed at one specific illness. It is closer to an expensive aroma used today, releasing a complex fragrance as it burns, delighting the senses on one hand and, on the other, using aroma to regulate qi and dispel filth.

People of the Song lived in a cultural world that prized “qin, chess, calligraphy, painting, poetry, wine, flowers, and incense.” “Incense” was both a matter of taste and a means of maintenance and care. Infant Fragrance belongs to this group of blends that “nourish the mood and support health.” Texts say that its fragrance resembles plum blossoms and describe it as “like the breath of an infant,” hence its name. Because its origin story involves official incense being used as ship ballast, the leftovers scraped off and sold, it was also called “Compensating Incense” (Changzhi xiang 偿值香).

From the standpoint of pharmacology, such compounded incense leans toward prevention and regulation. In a damp, hot environment with heavy miasma, burning a censer of incense can drive out foul indoor air and lift the spirits. When reading or writing at the desk, one can use the fragrance to steady the emotions and regulate the rhythm of breathing. It does not correspond to any one disease category in modern medicine. It is closer to a broad use for maintaining health, calming the mind, and dispelling unclean influences.

The Moment of Writing: Casual Semi-Formal Script for a Recipe

Judging only from its content, Yingxiangfang Tie is simply a memo noting proportions. In the history of calligraphy, though, it is thought to date roughly to the Yuanyou era and to be a concrete example of Huang Tingjian’s early running-cursive style.

The piece has a strong feeling of “being there” in several ways.

One is the corrections and marginal notes. In the original text, phrases such as “one liang of gongjia xiang (with ‘qian’ noted beside it)” and “one (changed to half) liang of yaxiao” and “four (changed to six) liang of refined honey” show the writer thinking as he writes, adjusting the numbers on the spot. He does not recopy the whole text, but amends it directly beside the characters, carefully but without fuss. This way of handling errors fits perfectly with the habits of a practical note, and is far from the tightly composed long scrolls we usually associate with Huang.

A second is the sense of speed in the brushwork. Seen as a whole, the lines are not widely spaced, the characters are not large, and most strokes are written with the brush held upright, the center of the tip moving along the line. Here and there the movement of the brush pulls out short connecting threads between characters, but they are brief and controlled. There are no greatly exaggerated presses and lifts or flamboyant turns. Rather than “performance,” what the eye sees is practiced rapid writing.

A third is the restraint in structure. In Huang’s mature running script, characters are often tall and slender, tight within and expanded outward, with horizontal strokes pulled into curves and vertical strokes twisting and bending. This creates a sense of tension—“awkward yet able to stretch.” In Yingxiangfang Tie, by contrast, many characters clearly tend toward the level and regular. They slant slightly up to the right, their centers of gravity are steady, left- and right-falling strokes are not deliberately elongated, and certain strokes even carry a touch of regular-script flavor.

These features make Yingxiangfang Tie look plain, even slightly stiff, on the page and give it some distance from the Huang Tingjian most people imagine, the one whose writing is “so strange that it becomes miraculous.” This is exactly why many readers are puzzled. If this is a genuine piece, is it “the least like Huang Tingjian of all Huang Tingjian’s works”?

“The Least Like Huang Tingjian”

From an aesthetic angle, Yingxiangfang Tie does differ from what is usually thought of as a typical “Shangu script.” Its strengths and weaknesses are both easy to see.

Its strength lies in its authenticity and restraint. The pace of the brush is fairly quick and the rhythm roughly even. There is no deliberate pursuit of risky, surprising strokes. The spacing between characters and between lines is that of everyday writing. It is neither “packed so tightly that air cannot pass” nor stretched out to show off the flow of the lines. The corrections and marginal notes make the whole page look very much like a work record just finished and not yet recopied. In a world that treats Huang Tingjian as the ultimate exemplar of “subjective” calligraphy, this plainness is, in its way, precious.

In terms of brushwork, Yingxiangfang Tie still preserves several basic features of Huang’s hand. Many vertical strokes curl back slightly at the end, forming an inward-turning “hook.” Dots and short strokes often begin with the side of the brush and then shift to the center, so the lines are not thick or swollen but feel bony and firm. In individual characters such as “musk” and “honey,” the structures still show a slight twist, tight at the top and looser at the bottom. These details show that even in a “casual writing” state, his system of writing remains stable.

Its weakness lies in a reduction of individuality and tension. Compared with works like Songfengge shi and Lianpo Lin Xiangru zhuan, the structures in Yingxiangfang Tie clearly tend toward the straight and flat. Horizontal strokes rarely bend boldly; vertical strokes mostly follow the central axis. The contrast of black and white across the sheet is not very strong. To eyes accustomed to modern exhibitions and high-resolution images, it is easy to see this as simply “a nicely written piece of everyday Song running script,” rather than “a visually striking Huang Tingjian.”

In this sense, calling Yingxiangfang Tie “the least like Huang Tingjian among his authentic works” is not without reason. It lacks the adventurous spirit that people most admire in Shangu’s writing, that ability to turn “awkward forms into marvels,” and it does not fully display his extreme pursuit of structure. It looks more like a “low gear” within his system of writing, reserved for dealing with everyday matters. Yet it is exactly this that makes Yingxiangfang Tie important for understanding Huang. It brings the calligrapher down from the altar to the desk and reconnects the extreme forms of “subjective” writing with the actual life of a scholar-official.

If Yingxiangfang Tie is laid on the table alongside the other three members of the “Four Masters of the Song”—Su Shi (苏轼), Mi Fu (米芾), and Cai Xiang (蔡襄)—the differences become even clearer.

The representative running-script works of Su Shi, such as Huangzhou hanshi shitie (《黄州寒食诗帖》), are known for their fullness and undulating movement. His strokes are weighty but not stiff; many characters lean and tilt, and the energy surges through the scroll. Critics call this style “calm, vigorous, and unrestrained,” opening up a new path of “spontaneous naturalness.” Even when he writes family letters, Su’s characters carry obvious rises and falls of personality.

Mi Fu’s running script is more intense still. Works like Tiaoxi shitie (《苕溪诗帖》) and Wujiang zhouzhong shi (《吴江舟中诗》) are famously summed up by Su Shi as “like battle ranks of sails and horses, calm and delightful, fit to stand with Zhong and Wang.” His brush moves in bursts, structures are broken apart and reassembled at will, and even small characters have the force of writing with the wrist lifted off the paper. When Mi Fu writes everyday documents, he usually does not rein in this energy, but takes every opportunity to play.

Cai Xiang is considered the most “law-abiding” among the Four. In his Zishu shigao juan (《自书诗卷》) and various letter-style running scripts, the strokes are warm and restrained, the structures upright and meticulous. His writing inherits the traditions of the Jin and Tang while showing a personal roundness and grace. Many critics say his strength lies in “drawing widely and forming his own,” while his weakness is that his individual tension is not as strong as that of Su, Huang, and Mi.

Placed among these three, Yingxiangfang Tie occupies a rather subtle position. It does not follow the “thought leads, brush follows” approach of Su and Mi. There is no bold rise and fall, no sudden outbreak of wildly childlike strokes. Yet in terms of rule and method it is not as thorough as Cai’s work. Many characters aim simply to get the words down, not to make each one perfect; the openings and closings of strokes are sometimes a little casual. Compared with Huang’s own canonical pieces, it lacks those perilous compositions in which characters are twisted almost out of shape yet manage, in the whole, to justify themselves. Instead, it is closer to Cai Xiang’s dignity and to the semi-formal style Su used earlier in his career when drafting memorials.

One could say that Yingxiangfang Tie pulls Huang Tingjian back into the category of “practical notes written without an eye to finish.” What occupies the writer’s mind is how to record the recipe clearly, not how to “establish a new lineage” on this sheet of paper. In this state, where the mind is not on calligraphy yet the writing still takes shape, later viewers can see his basic skills and natural habits in everyday script.

Looking at Shangu from “Qin, Chess, Calligraphy, Painting, Poetry, Wine, Medicine, and Incense”

Taken together—the contents of the incense formula, the circumstances of writing, and the features of the script—Yingxiangfang Tie presents a striking contrast. On one side stands the calligrapher described in histories and anthologies as famed for “subjectivity” and “strange, abrupt forms.” On the other stands a middle-aged man who cares about incense recipes, understands the properties of drugs, and is willing to copy out a formula in detail for a friend.

The Infant Fragrance formula is not a secret remedy for some particular illness. It is a miniature of a whole way of life. In a time of heavy humidity and miasma, people blended incense to harmonize body and mind, and through a single brazier of scent, gave rest to a tired body and an unsettled spirit. Yingxiangfang Tie places Huang Tingjian back into this living scene. Between the lines he is no longer “Shangu in the history of calligraphy,” but a many-sided person interested in “qin, chess, calligraphy, painting, poetry, wine, medicine, and incense”—someone who writes poems and characters, and also writes prescriptions; someone who, amid political turmoil and the long years of exile, still keeps a keen sense of smell and of the body.

For today’s readers, what matters may not be arguing over whether this is “the most unlike Huang Tingjian of his authentic works.” What matters is using this small semi-formal note to grasp a simple fact anew: a great calligrapher is first of all a person with a concrete life, not just a figure in works hanging on the wall.

Seen from Yingxiangfang Tie, the “exhibition style” so prevalent in contemporary calligraphy also comes into question. This style usually has a few common traits: oversized characters, exaggerated structures, strokes arranged purely for visual impact. The first concern of a piece is not use, but the shock it delivers to a viewer at a distance. Such works are indeed eye-catching, but they easily slide into a state where only “performance” remains and “writing” itself is lost.

In his mature period, Huang Tingjian’s large running-cursive pieces also have a strong element of performance. Structures are stretched to the edge of breaking; the flow of the lines on a scroll speeds up and slows down dramatically, with a marked theatrical rhythm. The transformations of some characters go almost so far that “one may not recognize the original character but will certainly recognize Huang Tingjian.”

Yingxiangfang Tie stands on the opposite side of all this. It tells the reader that the same Huang Tingjian can have very different “gears” in different situations. In long scrolls where he wants to “make a statement,” he dares to push his writing to the limit. In a note recording an incense formula, he puts away his sharp edges and gives his attention back to the content.

This has several implications for present-day practice, especially for reflecting on the “exhibition style.” One is to bring calligraphy back to “writing about something.” The force of Yingxiangfang Tie comes from the recipe itself and from the circumstances of writing, not only from the beauty of its lines. When contemporary artists create large works whose texts are nothing more than hollow phrases like “Heaven rewards diligence,” it is hard for any elaborate form to bear real weight. By contrast, when the words themselves carry lived experience or thought, even a more restrained form has its own appeal.

Another is to maintain the ability to work in multiple “gears.” Huang Tingjian could produce extremely subjective running-cursive works and also practical semi-formal notes. There is no break between the two. For many calligraphers today, the fact that they have only one “exhibition posture” and do not often write letters, notes, or everyday documents means that their abilities are, in effect, constrained by form. Yingxiangfang Tie reminds anyone who writes that basic semi-formal script and the skills of letter-writing are the deep muscles that support all performances.

A third implication is to reevaluate the value of the everyday. Under the combined pressure of collecting systems and market logic, people tend to look only at “representative works.” Yet what best reflects a calligrapher’s overall practice is often the inconspicuous scraps of daily writing: a reply to a letter, a notice, an account, a prescription. These objects are rare not because they are so beautiful, but because they are unmasked. They expose a person’s most genuine touch and rhythm.

From this angle, the lesson of Yingxiangfang Tie for our time is more than “plain writing can be good.” It urges viewers to reconsider the relationship between calligraphy and life. Characters are not born for exhibitions. Exhibition is only one moment of enlargement. Writing itself is, above all, a part of living.

When the spotlights in the gallery are switched off, what remains on the desk is often just such a casually written sheet of paper. It does not dazzle, but it stands up to repeated looking. It does not perform, yet it comes closer than many “exhibition styles” to the heart of calligraphy: using the hand, in real life, to set the mind down on paper.

Cai Xiang’s “Menghui Tie” (《蒙惠帖》) is a small thing, a running-standard note of only twenty-three characters:

蒙惠水林橘花，多感。天气喣和，体履佳安。襄上。
上公谨太尉左右。

Roughly: “Favoured with the water-woods tangerine blossoms you sent, I am much moved. The weather is mild and balmy; may your body and all your steps be in fine health. Written by Xiang, presented respectfully to Your Excellency the Grand Commandant.”

The content could not be more ordinary. A friend has sent tangerine blossoms from the rivers and woods; the writer thanks him, asks after his health, and mentions the “balmy weather.” A spray of oranges, a brief “much moved,” a spell of gentle air—these are details from everyday life. It is exactly this ordinariness that makes the piece a good touchstone for whether something counts as real “calligraphy.”

When people talk about good calligraphy, they need to distinguish “fa shu” (法书) from “shu fa” (书法). “Fa shu” stresses rule and technique. “Shu fa” cares more about the match between the writing, the content, and the writer’s state of mind. Put in plain terms, fa shu is like a strict uniform: the cloth and the cut are all correct, but the outfit is not necessarily right for every occasion. Calligraphy, in the stronger sense, is more like clothing chosen for a specific setting and mood, something that fits both the body and the moment. “Menghui Tie” offers a clear example that lets this difference come into focus.

The content comes first. In these twenty-three characters, half express thanks and half offer good wishes. The phrase “water-woods tangerine blossoms” turns the friend’s gift into an image: mist off the water, trees in leaf, and the fragrance of citrus all seem to roll onto the paper together. The two characters “much moved” check the emotion. They do not elaborate or exaggerate, but mark the kindness in a quiet way. “The weather is balmy” ties the outer climate to the inner warmth. “May your body and all your steps be in fine health” returns to the recipient and reminds both sides that they are living through a period of relative ease, with gentle weather and steady days.

Such content does not suit an angry, swelling brush, nor does it suit a withered, bitter one. It calls for a temperature that is just right, a rhythm that is unhurried and unforced. The lines of “Menghui Tie” move in exactly that rhythm. The brush works mainly with the center of the tip; at the turns it leans ever so slightly to one side. The strokes are full but not bloated. The movement of the lines runs on a slight diagonal from the upper right downwards, as if the writer were sitting at ease at his desk and letting the wrist follow its own natural swing. Between characters the spacing is close; between lines there is still room to breathe. The writing is neither cramped nor scattered.

The two characters for “balmy” are especially telling. The horizontals open out a little; the verticals close cleanly. The slanting strokes are not exaggerated. They feel like a spring breeze crossing the skin, raising no waves, yet making the air feel warmer. The warmth here is not the blaze of a flame but the slow rise of temperature under sunlight. The speed of the brush stays calm, the ink is moist and clear. Together they “act out” the word.

From this angle, “Menghui Tie” is not a display of virtuosity. In other works Cai Xiang (蔡襄) could write far more steeply and with more soaring movement, as in his long “Self-Written Poetry Scroll” (“Zishu Shijuan” 自书诗卷), where the rises and falls are more dramatic and the turns much sharper. In this small note he holds back his edge on purpose and writes in a tone close to the everyday. That restraint shows that the writer is thinking about the content. A note of thanks should not be too showy. A wish for someone’s “fine health in body and step” ought to feel steady, not imposing. This way of letting the characters make room for the words is a step beyond pure rule and technique.

If the view is widened to a few familiar masterpieces, the question “for whom does the form exist” becomes easier to see.

Yan Zhenqing (颜真卿), in his “Family Temple Stele” (“Jiamiao Bei”《家庙碑》), carved a text for his clan’s ancestral hall, announcing the deeds of forebears. The inscription is solemn and heavy, full of family loyalty and public virtue. The regular script on the stone has broad, thick structures. Many horizontals tip gently upward. The vertical strokes sink firmly. The brush often presses hard, then lifts, so that each character stands like a block of stone. Seen as a whole, the stele resembles a square hall with clear beams and pillars and a dense, dignified air. This sense of gravity comes from the content. A text for a family shrine cannot be light or playful, so the strokes, too, cannot be thin or frivolous.

By the time of the “Draft of a Requiem to My Nephew” (“Jizhi Gao”《祭侄稿》), the mood is utterly different. The prose recalls a nephew killed in the An Lushan Rebellion; between the lines we find “weeping bitterly” and “grief beyond bearing.” On the manuscript, the ink runs and pools. There are many mistakes and corrections. Horizontals drag on; verticals suddenly swell and then grow thin. Some characters almost lose the structure of regular script and approach wild cursive. Writing like this would be judged “out of form” if used for an official document. Yet in a funeral text, this loss of form is the emotion itself. Grief gives the writer no time to polish the layout. The brush follows the heart; the lines follow the breath. The order of the characters is shaken, and that disruption mirrors a real order already torn apart by war.

Su Dongpo (苏东坡) shows a similar pairing. “Cold Food Festival Manuscript” (“Hanshi Tie”《寒食帖》) was written during his exile in Huangzhou. The text speaks of loneliness and self-pity. The running script leans and tilts; the lines are sometimes dry and scratchy, sometimes suddenly full of spring. The layout of the lines tightens and loosens without warning, like a man pacing in the night, lifting his head now and then and then sinking back into thought. “Ode to the Red Cliff” (“Chibi Fu”《赤壁赋》) presents another face. Here the content turns to a calm meditation on history and fate. The running-standard script is more stable. The distance between lines is even. Turns are less sharp. The whole piece breathes in a settled way. If the texts were swapped, the mismatch would be hard to ignore.

These examples make one point clear. Real calligraphy does not start with a fixed form and then force every content into it. The content speaks first. Form runs after it. Before the brush touches the paper, the writer is already taken over by a certain feeling. The final look of the piece is an imprint of that feeling on brush and paper.

Here the idea of “fa shu” comes back. Traditionally, fa shu is an honorific for fine works of the past, meaning “writing with rules that can serve as law.” The whole system of copying in calligraphy grew around these fa shu. For learners, such rule-bearing models are vital. Without basic norms of structure and stroke, there can be no further development.

The problem comes when “rule” turns from means into end. Writing then stops at the level of “being able to write” and no longer asks “for whom” or “for what” one writes. In many modern pieces, the text can be changed at will while the appearance of the characters stays the same, as if copied and pasted. From a rich toolkit of techniques, the writer selects a single, familiar style and uses it for everything—whether the words are “grand opening,” a lament for the dead, or anything in between. Technically, this may be beyond reproach. As art, it can hardly be called a response to content.

The same pattern is especially common in rubbings of steles. Many works are almost direct transfers of the “Sweet Spring Inscription at the Jiucheng Palace” (“Jiuchenggong Liquan Ming”《九成宫醴泉铭》) or the “Preface to the Sacred Teaching Written at the Wild Goose Pagoda” (“Yanta Shengjiao Xu”《雁塔圣教序》) onto xuan paper. The shapes of the characters are accurate. The details are all there. Yet if the text on the model were replaced with another, the style would fit just as well. What the viewer senses is a fixed “style,” not the special emotion carried by this particular act of writing. Once a style can slide over any text without friction, writing falls back from expression into a display of technique.

“Menghui Tie” is worth looking at again and again because it is not such a “platter-style” piece of fa shu. Cai Xiang could easily have written this note in a more “proper” regular script. He chose not to. He made it a warm running-standard hand instead. The lines slope very slightly. At the end of many strokes the brush turns back a little, so they close in a rounded way and leave a faint aftertaste. Thanks to this handling, the reader can feel a trace of movement in the air even after finishing the words: the friend who brought the tangerine blossoms seems to have just left, and the fragrance still hangs over the desk. The mention of the “balmy” weather hints that both men are living through a relatively smooth season. A work that can make this delicate sense of everyday life visible has already moved beyond merely being “correct in rule.”

On a more basic level, writing itself is a kind of agreement. The shape of each character is agreed to point toward a certain meaning. Calligraphy adds another layer to this agreement. It aims not only to convey the meaning correctly, but also to suggest mood and attitude through shape and rhythm. It is like tone and pacing in speech, which can change the flavour of the same sentence.

In “Menghui Tie,” if “much moved” were written in wild cursive with sweeping gestures, it would become a loud, showy gratitude. If it were carved in stiff, square regular script, it would sound overly formal, even stiff. Cai Xiang chose a balanced running-standard hand that holds this emotion within the bounds of politeness and sincerity. The two characters of the closing “written by Xiang” are slightly smaller than the main text and tucked a little to the left. The gesture respects the etiquette of letter-writing but keeps a hint of private warmth between friends. This small shift in place is, at heart, a new contract between content and form.

Many contemporary calligraphy exhibitions show the opposite trend, a pure chase after visual effects detached from text. Some writers go for huge swings and “dynamic” gestures so that even a sober admonition to be thrifty looks like an advertising slogan. Others stretch and simplify the characters to extremes, turning sacred sayings into something like graphic design. In the hunt for a personal style, the bond between script and text is quietly cut. What remains is a kind of self-displaying pattern. Viewers facing such work can barely start from the meaning of the words to feel what the writer felt. They can only judge the surface: whether it resembles some famous hand, whether it seems “new.”

In terms of communication, this kind of writing moves farther and farther away from art. Art depends on real feeling that another person can sense. When the writer no longer cares about the content, the viewer can hardly feel any emotion that pierces the paper.

Most of the masterpieces that have been copied and admired over the centuries show a tight fit between form and content.

In Wang Xizhi’s “Preface to the Orchid Pavilion Gathering” (“Lanting Xu”《兰亭序》), the topic is a spring purification ceremony and literary gathering, and beneath it runs a reflection on the fleeting nature of life. The lifts and presses of the brush, the thin strokes that link characters, the alternation of connection and break, all carry both the ease of drinking with friends and the circling movement of meditation. The opening words “in the ninth year of Yonghe” are calm yet bright; the final phrase “how delightful are these words” rises clearly in energy, like a sigh let out after the wine has taken hold. If the same passage were cut into stiff clerical script, the sentences would still make sense, but the feeling would be much weaker.

Liu Gongquan (柳公权), in the “Stele of the Mysterious Pagoda” (“Xuanmi Ta Bei”《玄秘塔碑》), wrote an inscription for the follower of a powerful eunuch at the end of the Tang. The text formally praises the subject’s virtue, but later readers know the dense web of power behind it. Liu’s style is always “bony and strong,” yet on this stele it feels especially cold. Horizontal strokes end in sharp points. Vertical strokes resemble thin iron nails. Many scholars have linked this lean hardness to the tense politics of late Tang. There is no need to assume that Liu meant to criticize with his brush. It is enough to admit that the atmosphere of pressure he lived in seeped into his muscles. The work naturally carries that chill.

Mi Fu (米芾), in “Shu-su Tie” (《蜀素帖》), wrote poems of self-reflection and shifting fortune on plain silk from Shu. The paper is light and soft. In the running script many strokes kick up sharply at the end. The overall layout ripples outward like circles spreading on water. Readers do not see it only as a show of skill. They can sense the author’s restless yet self-delighting spirit. When the text speaks of “endless streams and hills, with plans to return still unsettled,” the brush follows with wavering motion.

These works have one thing in common. The writers seemed to let the text “direct” the movement of the hand. Technique is still there, and highly refined, but it no longer exists as an ornament with its own agenda. It is pulled along by the words. Today these pieces are classed as fa shu without problem, yet if they are seen only as technical models and their inner play between content and form is ignored, half their meaning is missed.

In the present landscape of calligraphy teaching and creation, the gap between fa shu and calligraphy takes on a very concrete shape.

Many training programs and contests reduce practice to a few fixed paths: in regular script one studies Ouyang Xun, Liu Gongquan, Yan Zhenqing, Zhao Mengfu; in running script one follows the Two Wangs, Mi Fu, Su Shi; in cursive script one copies Huai Su or Zhang Xu. The clearer the models, the easier it is to measure progress. As long as the structure resembles the model and the lines run smoothly, good marks follow. The content of the text hardly matters. Handwriting turns into pure formal exercise.

In such an environment, writers get used to handling every text with the same fixed style. They use it for old poems, for slogans, for festival greetings. Occasion, emotion, and audience do not really influence how the brush moves. This kind of training can raise skills quickly, but it dulls the writer’s sensitivity to content. Over time even viewers fall back on a single standard of taste: whether the work looks like some famous master.

“Menghui Tie” offers a different lesson. Even a short note of thanks can be treated as “content-driven” writing. The words are light, yet they have their own situation: a friend has sent flowers; the season is warm; the body is sound. The piece answers this scene with soft, rounded lines. It does not artificially elevate the mood, nor does it paint on sadness. If such a work were hung in a modern exhibition, it might not overwhelm others with impact at first glance, but in durability and credibility it would stand far ahead.

From the standpoint of craft, fa shu is a foundation. Without rule, writing slides into randomness. The real issue is not whether there is rule, but whether one is willing to push rule one step further and let it serve the content. Notes like “Menghui Tie” show that law and feeling do not have to clash. The structure of the running-standard script remains strict. The brushwork still traces back to the tradition. Yet nothing prevents the writer from slipping his present mood into the strokes.

When judging whether a piece stops at fa shu or crosses into calligraphy proper, a few simple questions can be asked. What is the content? Does the form speak with it? If the words mourn the dead, do the lines show any trace of heaviness or restraint, or do they chase “elegance” alone? If the words offer congratulations, do the strokes lift a little, or do they march ahead like a stone inscription? If the words are everyday talk between friends, does the flow of lines relax, or does it stand stiff as a memorial stele? These questions require no deep theory, only a sense for real situations in life.

For writers of the past, writing was simply part of living. Letters, official documents, memorials, and inscriptions on paintings were all tied to concrete occasions. Because of this, many famous pieces were not planned as “works of art.” They were documents written in passing. The content carried the person to a specific time and place. There, the brush traced the route of that moment’s feeling. For later viewers, this power to “bring someone back into the scene” is the true charm of calligraphy.

By this standard, the value of “Menghui Tie” lies not only in being “by Cai Xiang’s own hand” or “a work by a Song master.” It lies in preserving a very specific instant of life: someone has sent tangerine blossoms; the weather is warming; bodies are sound; two colleagues in office life find, within the limits of courtesy, a small piece of shared warmth. The slight tilt in the running-standard script and the faint catch at the turns of the brush are traces of that mood.

The line between “model writing” and “calligraphy” is not a matter of academic labels. It is a fork in the road of making. One road treats technique as the end and builds a style that can be copied again and again. The other treats technique as a bridge and lets the characters grow feelings once more. “Menghui Tie,” the “Draft of a Requiem to My Nephew,” and the “Cold Food Festival Manuscript” together remind readers that a high level of form cannot replace truth of content. Attractive lines that no longer carry a heart become nothing more than refined decoration.

If, in today’s calligraphy world, writers are willing to start again from small pieces like “Menghui Tie” and ask one simple question—“What are these words saying, and what kind of brush-energy does this scene call for?”—then writing may slowly move back from a mere demonstration of rule to a real showing of content. When the brush on paper becomes once more a tool for feeling, not only an instrument for display, the boundary between fa shu and calligraphy will no longer be so hard to cross.

Ren Jingjing (任晶晶)

On many calligraphy public accounts and short-video feeds, the scroll Autumn Heat, Resting at Duojing Tower (《秋暑憩多景楼帖》) is almost automatically presented as Mi Fu’s (米芾) “representative work in running script.” The introductions sound very assured: in the autumn of the ninth year of Yuanfeng under the Northern Song (1086), Mi Fu climbed Duojing Tower in Zhenjiang, was seized by inspiration, and left this combination of poem and calligraphy, whose authentic original is now housed in the Palace Museum in Beijing. With several enlarged details placed underneath, viewers quite naturally take it as the “standard Mi character” to copy from.

The trouble is that once this piece is set side by side with authenticated works—say the Qiaoxi Poem Scroll (《苕溪诗帖》), the Shu Su Scroll (《蜀素帖》), or fragments of the manuscript Sayings of Haiyue (《海岳名言》)—even if one stares at only a few characters, the same thought keeps surfacing: “Mi Fu would not write it like this.” This article has a very modest aim. Leaving aside received catalogues and expert verdicts, it looks only at the image in front of us and, at the most basic level of brushwork and structure, asks a single question: does this really look like Mi Fu’s own hand?

Starting from a Few Awkward Spots: Why Are the Strokes Written This Way?

If one really approaches this as an authentic piece by Mi Fu, the first thing that strikes the eye is not the wording of the poem but a chain of awkward details. Before the eye has travelled across the whole scroll, the hand already feels uneasy.

Many observers have noticed that the character “多” looks odd. When Mi Fu writes “多,” he usually makes the top light and the bottom heavy. At the turning point there is a clear, angular change of direction, as if the brush suddenly cuts and then presses down, carrying a slight sense of rise and fall. Here, the “多” is drawn smoothly in a few strokes. The angular turn disappears, the corner is rounded off, and the character stiffens. It no longer has the tension of lines that have been pulled and stretched.

The right halves of “纵” and “似” have similar problems. The “从” and “以” components on the right are dashed off in a few casual hooks. The line runs all the way to the end without enough pressing and lifting, and the rhythm goes missing. Mi Fu’s brush usually ranges freely in all directions. Even when he writes in haste, every turn has a split second of check and release, like a foot planting on the ground before pushing off again. Here, however, the line simply skids through, leaving only a careless outline.

The characters “到,” “涯,” and “应” are even more direct in revealing what is wrong: the order of strokes itself is incorrect. Mi Fu is a calligrapher who is acutely attentive to stroke order. Even in running-cursive script he does not casually overturn the inner skeleton of a character. In this “到,” the writer clearly first worries about getting the outer shape, and only then fills in a few strokes. The structure just barely holds together, but the inner flow of energy has been broken. For a seasoned calligrapher—especially someone like Mi Fu, whose brush path has become second nature—it is very hard to imagine this kind of “draw the outline first, then patch the inside” approach.

The two horizontals of “共” are a case in point. One is thick, the other thin, which is not a problem in itself, yet here they feel like they belong to two different hands. The upper stroke is so light it almost floats away; the lower stroke suddenly grows heavy. There is no transition in weight between them. Mi Fu’s horizontals usually “pause slightly at the beginning and lift the tip at the end.” The change in thickness is obvious, but the rhythm is continuous. In this scroll that transitional pressing and lifting is simply not there.

Characters such as “楼” and “应” expose the writer’s lack of experience even more. On the right side of “楼,” the connected strokes run too fast. Several vertical-bending-hooks are crowded together and the center of gravity floats. In “应,” the “广” component should begin with a hidden tip entering the paper, then a small backward turn under the “roof,” and only then move down along the stroke. Here it is a single hard line from top to bottom, joined at a place that should not be joined at all, as if the only goal were to “have more connections on the surface.”

Pulling out these characters one by one is not a matter of nitpicking. It points to a simple fact: an accomplished calligrapher will not keep making such student-level mistakes within one and the same piece. These problems look much more like the work of someone who has read Mi Fu’s scrolls many times and is now, relying on memory, “drawing” the appearance of Mi Fu’s writing, rather than letting the lines grow naturally out of his own hand.

Fragments of the manuscript Sayings of Haiyue (《海岳名言》)

Where Has the “Mi Spirit” in the Lines Gone? There Is Dryness and Fatness, but No Elasticity

Now look again at the brushwork. At first glance, the ink tones and the lines seem to carry a “Mi flavor.” Variations between dry and wet are obvious. The brush tip does not always drag in a dead line. In some places it even flares out. For viewers who do not know Mi Fu well, this visual effect is already persuasive enough.

Yet once the eye moves closer, the problem appears.

In works that are widely accepted as genuine, the most captivating quality of Mi Fu’s lines is their elasticity. When his brush moves, the line is not glued flat to the paper. It is always ready to “turn back.” The start of the stroke pauses lightly; in mid-course the hand lifts a little; at the end the stroke either breaks sharply or makes a small twist. The whole line feels like a bowstring that is constantly being pulled tight and then loosened. It has strength and also a sense of return.

In this Duojing Tower Scroll, the strokes are thick and thin, but they lack that turning-back quality. Many lines are dragged to the end in one breath. Along the way there is almost no real storing of power. The thick parts often come from heavy inking and generous water, while the thin parts are simply where the brush has gone dry. What we see here is mostly a difference in the amount of ink, not in the hand’s control of pressure. Look longer and it becomes clear that the contrast between “fat” and “lean” is superficial, and the inner rise and fall of muscle and bone is not sufficient.

Take the characters “景” and “楼” as an example. The vertical strokes look imposing, yet along their path there is almost no true pause. The speed at the top and at the bottom is the same, as if someone enlarged a piece of hard-pen writing. The long right-falling strokes spread out on the surface, but the inside is hollow. They are lacking that granular feeling of a brush tip “scraping forward under pressure.” Even when Mi Fu’s long strokes break into flying white, the bones still tremble with force. Here, most of them are smooth smears of black.

Put in simple terms, this scroll has learned Mi Fu’s “ink,” but not his “hand.” On the surface it works hard to imitate the interplay of fat and thin, dry and wet. In truth it lacks the inner elasticity and control that hold those effects together.

Imbalance in Structure: Places Where “Mi Fu Would Not Write It Like This”

Move a step deeper and the issue becomes one of structure. Brushstrokes can be copied. Structure is harder to fake, because it reflects habits built up over many years.

The characters “度” and “江” are among the most jarring in the whole piece. When Mi Fu writes “度,” the upper part is usually a little tight and the lower part opens out. Between “又” and “广” there is a natural twist. The vertical-bending-hook on the right side often carries a slanting force, so that the whole character leans forward, as if walking sideways into the wind. In this scroll, “度” is thin on top and heavy below, with its weight pressed into the lower left. “又” is written as two separate strokes. Such handling has not been seen in Mi Fu’s authentic work.

“涯” and “渐” are even more telling. Mi Fu likes to write the water radical “氵” with a sense of gliding. The first dot is light, the second steadier, and the third heavy. The three dots do not stand in equal intervals, but in a clear forward-backward sequence. Here, the three dots hesitate and dull. The space between them feels measured and stiff. They look like symbols pasted next to the right-half components, and they never truly hook into the vertical force of the rest of the character.

The second “多” again reveals the imbalance. The top half is thin and elongated. The bottom left-falling and right-falling strokes suddenly turn thick, as if two lines written at different speeds were stitched together. Even when Mi Fu, in a fit of excitement, loses control, his rhythm tends to be “heavy first, then light” or “light, then suddenly heavy, then light again.” This particular pattern—light on top, an abrupt, stiff heaviness below—is rarely seen in his genuine work.

This kind of structural problem runs through the whole scroll. Many characters have central spaces that are either too narrow or oddly skewed. The strokes do not pull against each other or echo one another. Taken together, they look as if they were produced by consulting a “Mi Fu character dictionary” and copying stroke by stroke, rather than by allowing the structure to grow naturally in the course of writing.

From this angle, the piece looks more like a student rehearsing Mi Fu on paper. With each character the question seems to be, “Does it look right?” instead of simply letting the brush follow its own momentum: “Let it go this way.”

Put Beside the “Real Mi Fu”: Missing That Half-Step of “Loss of Composure”

Part of the reason later generations became so obsessed with Mi Fu lies in his willingness to “lose composure.” He is not afraid of ugliness on the page. His strokes often push past accepted norms, and a character may suddenly balloon in size or twist off axis. Because of this half-step beyond propriety, there is a kind of almost willful vitality in his work.

Compared with that, the so-called Duojing Tower Scroll looks quite different when seen in parallel. A few simple comparisons are enough.

Take the characters “梦” and “风” in this piece and place them next to the same characters in the Qiaoxi Poem Scroll. In the authentic scroll, “梦” almost lies sideways across the page. The long left-falling and right-falling strokes extend to an extreme length and even carry a hint of distortion, which becomes part of the charm. In our version, “梦” has clearly been straightened and corrected. Both long strokes are kept obediently inside the character’s frame.

In genuine works, Mi Fu tends to write “风” with a very long, hooked “几” component. The tail often lashes all the way out, creating a fierce momentum. Here, the lower half of “风” looks soft. The closing stroke is cautious, as if afraid to overstep.

Look again at the “多” and “江” in the Shu Su Scroll or in Sayings of Haiyue. Among their strokes there are always a few surprises: perhaps a patch of empty white appears out of nowhere, or one stroke suddenly becomes far too thick. Yet the character as a whole becomes more alive because of this. In the Duojing Tower version, every character moves safely within a reasonable range. Even when contrasts between thick and thin are pushed a bit, the underlying structures stay overly well-behaved.

Put differently, this piece does not fail to imitate “Mi Fu’s poses.” What it keeps avoiding is Mi Fu’s potential for losing control. It wants to “look like Mi Fu,” but not to be “as unrestrained as Mi Fu.”

This is especially clear in the signature. In genuine titles by Mi Fu, the strokes become even more erratic. The characters are slightly smaller, the rhythm is more urgent, and at times the writing grows so cursive that it takes effort to decipher. Here, the inscription is very regular. The spacing between characters is even. The breath is held tight. It is hard to connect this with the Mi Fu who, on the page, seems to “dance calmly yet wildly” at the same time.

The Ideal of “Grasping the Spirit, Forgetting the Form” Has Not Been Reached: Only a “Mi Fu Shell” Remains

Viewed as a whole, this Duojing Tower Scroll looks more like a collective image of “Mi-style” writing formed by later followers. Characters should be plump. Ink should be lively. The flow between lines should drift lightly. The slanting of characters cannot go too far. Structures cannot fall apart. As a teaching model, it is indeed quite attractive. When presented as an authentic work, it becomes awkward.

On the level of brush technique, the piece does grasp several key words associated with “Mi flavor”: fat strokes, dry strokes, flying white, linked movements. It even makes some verticals shoot out at angles and some right-falling strokes rise like wings. Yet these choices feel overly rational, like the execution of a recipe, not the natural outcome of writing.

Structurally, the scroll tries to keep the rules of regular script while not daring to step fully into the abandon of running-cursive. It ends up stranded in an awkward middle zone. On the surface it is running script. In its bones it is “regular script plus decorative side components.” This is far from Mi Fu’s genuine work. His running script looks unruly, but inside it the rules are strict. Every component and every structure follows a carefully disciplined brush path. The Duojing Tower Scroll clearly has not entered that system.

If one had to sum it up in a single line: the piece has caught Mi Fu’s “intention”—the wish to write in a flying, full, and dashing manner—but it has not reached the state of “forgetting the form.” What remains is an enlarged shell that looks like Mi Fu.

“Grasping the spirit and forgetting the form” is usually taken as a high ideal in art: once the artist has seized the ancient master’s spirit, there is no need to cling to outward likeness, and one can write in one’s own way. Mi Fu himself is just such a figure. He learned from Wang Xizhi, from Yan Zhenqing, from Chu Suiliang, and finally turned all of this into his own wild lines. If this Duojing Tower Scroll were truly his, it is hard to imagine that it would be so concerned at every step with outward form and resemblance.

Autumn Heat, Resting at Duojing Tower: A Competent “Mi-Style” Work

By this point, the conclusion is quite clear. Based on what can be seen in the present images, it is not convincing to treat this scroll as an authentic work written by Mi Fu himself.

In terms of brushwork, many places reveal the hesitation and strain of a later learner. In terms of structure, the problems are not occasional slips, but a pattern of imbalance and caution. In terms of style, the scroll looks more like a “Mi-style formula” distilled by later admirers than like the work of that Northern Song calligrapher who seems almost ready to leap off the paper.

This does not mean that the piece has no merit. On the contrary, if it is judged as a later work, its overall layout is orderly, the flow between columns is smooth enough, and the contrasts between thick and thin, dry and wet, fall in a range that is quite pleasant to look at. Hung in a modern exhibition hall, it can certainly stand as a “high-level running script in the Mi style.” The labels “authentic work” and “representative piece,” however, should be attached with greater care.

A more reasonable attitude might be this: treat it as a collective imagining of “Mi Fu” within a certain later period. Perhaps a calligrapher in the Ming or even later, after reading, memorizing, and copying Mi Fu’s scrolls over and over, built from them a personal reconstruction of the “ideal Mi character.” That image of Mi Fu has already drifted away from the historical person, yet under the eyes of later viewers it lives quite well. It is more upright, better suited for copying, and easier to use as a “standard answer.”

The real difficulty does not lie in the piece itself, but in the unexamined language of authenticity that surrounds it. Once a work is repeatedly promoted as a “representative piece” or “Palace Museum treasure,” ordinary viewers almost lose the chance to raise questions from the writing itself. The more people copy it, the more their eyes are trained to trust a ready-made template. In the process they drift ever further from the danger and improvisation that marked Mi Fu’s own writing.

Seen in this light, putting Autumn Heat, Resting at Duojing Tower back into the category of “Mi-style work” may be a fairer way to treat it. The scroll reminds us that what makes Mi Fu hard to learn is not the outward fat brush and the flying white, but the energy running through his brush path. Once that energy is gone, no amount of formal similarity can support the word “authentic.”

So rather than raising this scroll to the summit of “Mi Fu’s running script,” it is more honest to say: this is a later calligrapher’s competent work, written with respect and understanding for Mi Fu. It carries Mi Fu’s shadow, but not his fate. When it stands next to that Northern Song “madman of calligraphy,” it still falls short by half a step—the half step that dares to lose composure, to expose flaws, and to write an entire sheet right up to the edge of losing control.

RenJingjing

This piece of semi-cursive script is written on a “Guoying No. 638 Factory Memo” (国营第六三八厂便函). The paper is standard red-headed letterhead: three vertical columns of main text, plus one column of colophon and signature. The content comes from a letter by Su Shi (Su Dongpo, 苏东坡). The calligrapher lifts a Song-dynasty letter and sets it down on a late-socialist factory memo, so the viewer is pulled at once into a slightly dislocated scene: a Song writer’s voice, office stationery that looks like the 1980s, and today’s calligraphy-course promotion all layered into one image. The piece is advertised as aiming “somewhere between Su and Yan,” but in terms of brushwork and structure it sits much closer to the line of Su and Cai. It has almost no direct kinship with the running script of Yan Zhenqing (颜真卿).

Overall impression: clear, clean, but a bit “thin”

Seen from a distance, the writing looks clean, clear, and unforced. The lines are spaced fairly wide. The three main columns lean slightly to the right and form a faint “person” shape on the page, which keeps the layout from feeling rigid without trying to manufacture dramatic diagonals. The characters are more or less the same size. The overall value on the page is neutral. There is none of the wild, flying dry-brush of Mi Fu (米芾), and none of the heavy ink piling popular in current styles. It belongs to a restrained and quiet type.

At the same time, one tendency stands out. The strokes run on the slim and long side. The horizontals are not thick; the verticals feel slightly “pulled.” This thinness is not the elegant bone of Lady Wei (卫夫人), but the result of mostly centered strokes that end with a frequent, visible point of the brush. Viewers who favor full and rounded lines may find the energy a bit light. Yet for a piece of semi-cursive on memo paper, this lightness actually suits the intimate, letter-like setting.

Brushwork: centered strokes with slanting exits, edge sharper than flesh

Look more closely and the character of the strokes becomes clear. Most strokes begin with a hidden tip; many end with the point exposed. This is especially true of the slants, the sweeping strokes, and the hooks. At the end of a stroke, the brush often flicks out a short, pointed tip with slightly heavier ink, as if a held breath were released in that last moment. Here the distance from Yan Zhenqing’s calm, rounded fullness is obvious. Yan’s sweeping strokes may also end with a visible tip, but they are wrapped in thick ink, so the edge hides inside the flesh. In this work, the edge sits outside and the flesh inside.

Most horizontals move forward with a parallel, centered stroke that rises a little toward the end. The speed is not slow. The pressure shifts, but not dramatically, so the change in thickness is limited. The bones are there; the flesh is thin. The verticals, by contrast, have marked stops and starts. In characters like “jing” 景, “fan” 繁, and “gui” 归, the vertical enters the paper with a slight pause, then runs straight down. Near the end it pulls a bit to one side and finishes with a modest slanting tip. The look is very close to the Su–Cai lineage.

The dots also show the writer’s intention. The upper dots tend to be small and sharp, as if dropped in passing rather than shaped on purpose. Dots lower in the character are somewhat enlarged to “anchor” the form. The contrast in weight between upper and lower dots is close to habits seen in Su Shi’s letters, and quite different from the heavy, triangular dots of Yan Zhenqing. What is stressed here is the path of the brush tip, not the bulk of the ink.

Structure: shaped by Su Shi, tightened by Cai Xiang

In structure, this semi-cursive script does not follow the square, full pattern of Yan’s style, which spreads horizontally and fills the waist and belly of the character. Many characters have a tightened center. Their center of gravity sits high. They are narrower from side to side, and the vertical thrust is strong. In the sequence of “jing” 景, “fan” 繁, “qing” 请, and “chun” 春, each character feels as if a vertical spine is holding it up from within, rather than a square frame enclosing it. This trait is close to Su Shi’s later letters.

Su’s running script often gathers at the top and opens at the bottom. The brush skips and leaps; the structure is loose yet not scattered. Cai Xiang’s (蔡襄) semi-cursive, on the other hand, pays more attention to a tight center and a relaxed outer contour. Many of the characters here lean toward Su in spirit but Cai in structure. “Chun” 春, for instance, is written with a fairly tight center. The horizontals are not stretched. The slanting strokes leave the form decisively. The whole character has a slightly sharp, wrapped-tight feel.

Because the centers are so tight, the balance in some characters becomes a little constrained. In “zhe” 者 and “jian” 间, for example, the inner strokes cluster around the vertical axis. The sides do not open out enough, so the characters look narrow. If the writer allowed a bit more horizontal spread, the overall air of the piece would be more relaxed. As it stands, the script often feels like someone speaking with the breath held.

Flow and layout: the tone of a letter, with a rather cautious three-column design

In terms of layout, the writer clearly intends to keep the flavor of a letter. The two columns of main text on the right have tighter character spacing and slightly looser line spacing. The middle column, which carries a brief comment, shifts a little to the left and stands apart from the main text. The colophon on the left is again separated from the middle column by clear blank space. One glance tells the viewer where the comment is, where the original text is, and where the present writer speaks.

This arrangement has a real advantage. The eye moves along a natural route from right to middle to left, so the reader follows time and context in order. But the weakness is there as well. The use of space is a bit too safe. The middle to lower part of the sheet has a large area of blank paper. All three columns sit in the upper half. The broad empty band below is held down only by a single red line. The result is slightly “top-heavy.” If the colophon on the left were placed a little lower, or if the lower part of the page carried a few more strokes, the layout would have more rise and fall.

In terms of the flow of the lines, this piece favors “continuity” over “rhythm.” The writer is careful to keep the energy moving from one character to the next. The directions of the strokes echo each other. When several vertical-heavy characters appear in a row, the next column continues with the same vertical framework. Yet the contrast in rhythm is not strong enough. The piece lacks those deliberate pauses that make the viewer tense for a moment and then relax. In Su Shi’s letters, a character will suddenly swell in size or tilt to one side. That move breaks the steady tempo. This copy has not yet fully learned that lesson.

Words from Su, brushwork leaning toward Cai

Because the text is by Su Shi, the viewer naturally thinks of “Su-style” script. From several key features, it is clear that the writer is consciously approaching Su Dongpo. The characters are a bit tall. Their vertical proportion is slightly tilted. The brush does not stay inside a regular-script grid but moves with a semi-cursive ease. In the middle of some characters, a stroke will suddenly “jump,” as in “fan” 繁. The interior lines become a little exaggerated. That willingness “not to fear ugliness” is learned from Su.

Yet the rhythm of the whole piece is much more even than in Su’s hand. In Su’s semi-cursive letters, the tempo within one letter can swing wildly. Some characters are written in a few fast, simple strokes. Others suddenly become large and heavy. A whole letter reads like something dashed off in passing, with big ups and downs. This copy, by contrast, seeks balance. The size range is narrow. The lines move with even spacing. The writer is reluctant to let the hand wander. That restraint is exactly what marks Cai Xiang’s semi-cursive: tight centers, steady rhythm, a dignified air. In this respect, the piece looks more like a blend of “Su-style text and Cai-style script.”

Another detail is worth noting. Many horizontals end with a slight upward flick. Their length is moderate; they do not drag on. The sweeping strokes to the lower right, however, have clear stops and starts. The brush drops a bit heavier at the beginning and then leaves quickly with the tip. This combination can be seen in Cai Xiang’s Self-Written Poems (Zishu shi, 《自书诗》) and some of his inscriptions. In terms of form, the writer’s instinct is to drift toward Cai. In spirit, the admiration is directed strongly at Su. That is why the result looks like “Su-style text with Cai-style appearance.”

Natural rather than stiff, fresh rather than flashy, with a personal edge

Set against the broader field of contemporary semi-cursive pieces, this work has several rare strengths.

First, it feels natural. Many semi-cursive works today carry a strong sense of “produced artwork” from the first stroke. Every character and every line seems to serve the goal of looking impressive, and the result often resembles labels in a gallery. This piece, though written as an exhibition inscription, still keeps the casual ease of a letter. The relation between characters is not the product of careful calculation. It follows the motion of the hand. That quality is valuable.

Second, it looks fresh. The ink tone is controlled with some care. There is no heavy overuse of dark ink, and no deliberate pursuit of dramatic dry-brush effects. The paper itself is ordinary office stock, not a “noble” material, and the writer does not try to transform it through extreme ink tricks. Instead, the work follows the nature of the paper and becomes a sheet of even, restrained gray. In an age fond of splashing ink and theatrical brush flinging, this freshness is actually unusual.

Third, it has an edge. As noted earlier, the strokes are slim, and the edge of the brush is visible. If this sharpness were handled poorly, it would easily stiffen into the feel of ball-point pen writing. Here the treatment is not perfect, but at least it shows that the writer is consciously using pressure and speed to soften the rigidity, and using slight tilts in the character shapes to adjust the hard lines. The piece, as a whole, stays alive. It is not a sheet of iron. Several strokes where the sweeping lines end with a “stopped-and-then-released” tip add a touch of sharpness that is not vulgar.

Hard bones, little flesh, a steady but monotonous rhythm, and a hint of “just finishing the job”

Under these strengths, the issues are also clear. The first problem lies in the strokes. Their thinness is a general trend. When the writer further stresses sharpness at certain points, it can eat away at the thickness of the ink. In “jing” 景 and “gui” 归, for instance, the verticals and long slants are written very dry. Inside the line there is little subtle change in width, so after a while the eye feels some roughness. If the writer slowed the brush slightly at key spots and allowed a bit of “returning the tip and storing energy,” the inside of the line would gain a little flesh, and the sharpness would be less aggressive. That would move the work closer to the balance that Su and Cai both seek.

The second problem again concerns structure. Many characters have tight centers. That by itself is not a fault. But when dozens of characters in a row are wrapped in the same vertical tightening, the whole sheet begins to look cramped. This piece suffers from the lack of occasional relaxation that might break that pattern. The writer could choose a few key characters and deliberately enlarge them or let them spread sideways a bit. That would disrupt the balance in a good way. In Su’s letters, he often throws in a very relaxed, open character in the middle of a sentence, and that single character shifts the mood of the whole passage. Here, the lines feel as if “someone is speaking quietly from start to finish.” By the end, the reader senses a certain monotony of breath.

The third problem is in the layout. It has already been mentioned that the page is “heavy on top, light below,” and that the change in density is mainly horizontal, not vertical. For a work on memo paper, this is not a fatal flaw. But from a higher standard, there is room to improve. The gap between the middle comment column and the right main text could be used more boldly. Some crossing or offsetting of lines would create a visual rhythm that jumps across columns. At present, the arrangement is too regular. It looks a bit like something typeset by software.

The final issue is the expression. Letter-style calligraphy can suffer from two opposite problems: the laziness of “writing only for oneself,” and the tension of “writing to be displayed.” This piece leans toward the latter. Every character is written very “properly.” The hand is reluctant to let go, as if always checking how closely it matches the original model. So while the copy stays fairly true to the source, it loses some of the naive ease. For a semi-cursive piece that salutes Su Dongpo, this is a pity. What makes Su’s script so charming is precisely that sense of freedom—of “not fearing ugliness and not fearing flaws being exposed.”

Not between “Su and Yan,” but between “Su and Cai”

Taken as a whole, this semi-cursive work on factory memo paper has its strengths in naturalness, freshness, and a personal sharpness. It does, in fact, find its footing in the shared tradition of Su Shi and Cai Xiang. Measured against Yan Zhenqing, the stylistic distance is wide. “Between Su and Yan” sounds more like a slogan meant to catch the eye. If one must place the work in a lineage, a more accurate description would be “Su-style text with Cai-style appearance, with a strand of present-day personal taste woven in.”

As an exhibition inscription, the piece has reached a level of neatness and readability that is more than adequate. As a practice piece that learns from the ancients, it also shows that the writer has grasped something of Su’s and Cai’s brushwork and is willing to add a measure of personal edge to certain strokes. What now keeps it from moving to a higher level is not technique but breath. If the writer can keep the strength of the lines while letting the structures grow more relaxed, the rhythm more varied, and a few characters more at ease, the work will shift from “a nicely written semi-cursive piece” to “a letter that carries warmth.”

The memo paper, the red factory header, and Su Shi’s text, when put together, already make a collage dense with the taste of a particular era. This piece holds those elements inside a well-behaved semi-cursive frame. The next step, if the writer is willing to push further inside that frame and let sharpness and fullness come to a better balance, may be to write a work that truly “carries the spirit of Su without becoming a slave to Su.”

Ren Jingjing

When people talk about contemporary running script, a few names are hard to avoid: Shen Yinmo (沈尹默), Zhao Puchu (赵朴初), and Cao Baolin (曹宝麟). All three see themselves as walking the same “Su Dongpo line,” yet they have ended up with completely different faces. Shen Yinmo tends toward elegance and restraint; Zhao Puchu is warm, rounded, and full; and Cao Baolin, in this piece of running script, gives an immediate impression summed up in two words: hard edged.

This “hardness” is not the stiff rigidity of an amateur hand. It is a deliberate choice: to hold on to a sharp brush tip, upright strokes, and taut structures, and to keep them on a line that refuses to yield. Many people say Cao Baolin has an upright character and a blunt temper. Such impressions of personality are not proof of anything, but they do offer a helpful angle. In this piece, there is indeed a clear refusal to “smooth things over.”

Three paths from the same source: starting with Su Dongpo

The first direct impression this work gives is the sharpness of the brush tip. He often enters a stroke with the side of the brush, and just as often lets the stroke trail off with a small point of “steel.” The lines look clean and decisive, without frayed edges or muddy, dragging traces.

Seen from the positive side, the energy of each stroke is highly concentrated. Horizontal strokes do not drag, verticals are not limp, hooks and lifts are crisp and have something of the feel of carved knife cuts. This way of writing is well suited to projecting a sense of decisiveness and cool control. It is not easily written into the vague, floating realm of “airy strokes.”

Because he relies heavily on the side tip to enter the paper, many lines take on the shape of a slightly flattened standard-script stroke. The rounding at the turns is reduced. The most attractive feature of running script lies in the way the momentum of the line carries across characters, in the natural rise and fall of the stroke in motion. In this work, the lines spend more time “standing at attention” and only occasionally “at ease.” Places where the brush really opens up are not many.

The contrast with Shen Yinmo is clear. Shen’s brush often puts the center tip in front and lets the side tip follow, so each line has a kind of rounded-tube fullness within. Many of Cao’s lines, in many characters, feel more like a flat blade: the strength is concentrated on one plane and shows little desire to turn in an arc. The difference with Zhao Puchu is even clearer. In Zhao’s running script, the transitions between pressing and lifting are often very fine; the tip of the brush seems to turn and move about inside the character. Cao’s brush tip, by contrast, seems to travel straight through the character on direct paths.

This sharp method brings another effect: a tightened rhythm. There are few points of obvious pause or relaxation inside the characters. The viewer’s eye is pushed forward again and again, yet finds few places to “take a breath.” For a single piece, this is both an asset and a burden: the tension is strong, but the stamina is somewhat weaker.

Lining Cao Baolin up beside Shen Yinmo and Zhao Puchu, one thing is sure: all three take Su Dongpo (苏东坡) as their main model, and there are explicit statements and clear traces in their work to show it. The key to Su Dongpo’s running script does not lie in the surface signs of “tilt” and “casualness,” but in the calm of the brushwork, the broad, open structures, and a relaxed tone in which “the idea leads and the brush follows.”

Shen Yinmo grasped this early. He studied Su, Huang, and Mi carefully, while reading Wang Xizhi and Yan Zhenqing side by side. What he finally did was to “bind Song-dynasty looseness with Tang-dynasty bone”: his lines look gentle, but the center tip is firm, and at each turn there is a strength that has been pressed down.

Zhao Puchu, in a sense, “digests Su Dongpo through personality.” His running script is unhurried, his lines rounded and smooth, his pressing and lifting without drama. His structures tend to gather the center, and a whole piece reads like an even-tempered, patient argument.

What Cao Baolin has taken from Su Dongpo, by contrast, is clearly the “hard” side. His understanding of Su’s style leans toward bone and force: he focuses on clear pressing and lifting, obvious side thrusts, and writes characters that stand on the paper like little blocks of stone. In this work that quality is especially obvious. Looked at this way, all three men hang the “Su Dongpo” sign, but they walk three separate roads: Shen Yinmo is “Song looseness constrained by Tang bone,” Zhao Puchu is a “personality-shaped Su Dongpo,” and Cao Baolin is a “bone-strength Su Dongpo.”

A unified order, limited surprises

On the level of structure, the strongest feature of this running script is its uniformity. The general tendency is horizontal; the central parts of the characters are tightly controlled; the spacing between components is small; verticals often lean slightly to the right. Almost every character operates within the same system.

This sense of unity easily brings Zhao Puchu to mind. Zhao also cared about a coherent overall look, but his unity rests more on “roundness,” while Cao’s rests more on “straightness.” Take characters such as “秋” and “家,” which stack elements top to bottom. Zhao would often write the upper part a bit looser so the lower part has room to turn. Cao tightens both top and bottom, so the whole character is like a compressed spring.

There are only a handful of exceptions, such as the characters “居” and “君,” where he pushes the structure a little beyond his usual rules. Looking at these exceptions helps to see his temperament more clearly. It is not that he cannot “let go,” but that he knowingly chooses to let go much less. In a few characters there are tentative moves—lengthening a side component, widening the inner white space—but this release is quickly pulled back by the severe order of the following lines, like someone in a ranks taking half a step out and then falling back into line.

Compared with Shen Yinmo, the difference lies in the sense of width. Shen’s running script stretches more sideways; the outer contour of a character often looks like a slightly flattened rectangle. The spaces between characters are consciously widened, so reading across the line gives a feeling of airy breathing. Cao’s structures tilt vertically. His characters are tall and slim, narrow on the sides, and packed tightly together so that the whole piece gives off an upward, squeezing force.

This unified order is the strength of the work, but also its limit. It guarantees visual neatness and a very recognizable style, yet it compresses the space for variation in structure. For a work written with exhibitions in mind, this choice is understandable, but viewers may still feel that “risk” and “play” are in short supply.

In terms of ink, the handling here is plainly “by the book.” Rich ink dominates. At times there are dry, scratching strokes, but they are dry without being lifeless, and wet without blooming. Seen as a whole, there are almost no extreme flying-white effects and no large patches of pooled ink. The advantage is safety. Exhibition pieces dread mishaps: ink that is too wet bleeds, ink that is too dry breaks, and overly dramatic ink contrasts easily steal the eye and break the work’s unity.

Cao Baolin deliberately keeps his ink within a narrow band, so the viewer’s attention stays on the movement of strokes and the structures of the characters rather than on ink games.

The cost is a weaker sense of rhythm in the ink itself. Su Dongpo’s running script, at its best, has a sense of “weather inside the ink.” Within a line, the ink often moves from wet to dry; within a piece, one can see a progression from dense to light. Zhao Puchu, in big hanging scrolls, sometimes uses slightly wetter ink to strengthen the “breath-opening” of a given column, adding swells and troughs to the whole. In this work by Cao Baolin there are few such waves. The ink tends to walk in step with the brushwork rather than sounding like a separate voice.

One might call this a “rational ink method.” It serves the overall order; it does not try to steal the scene, and it is not eager to perform. From a purely aesthetic angle, though, this evenness in ink also weakens the sense of time in the work. The viewer cannot easily feel that “here the ink grows more generous, there it pulls back.” It is more like listening to a speech delivered from start to finish at the same volume.

A self-consistent “hard-line Su style”

In terms of overall layout, this running script is clearly composed for a central hanging scroll or a long handscroll. Line spacing is fairly even. Characters are close to one another. The vertical columns stagger slightly, but not much. Seen as a whole, the piece is a long line pressing forward from top to bottom.

Here the author’s concern for “overall atmosphere” is evident. The composition does not search for big turns, nor does it design obvious “climactic sections.” Instead, it lets that hard-edged rhythm run on from beginning to end. Viewed from a distance, the work looks like a wall of strokes. Only at close range do sentences and line breaks become clear.

Compare this with Shen Yinmo’s larger pieces, and a different kind of orchestration appears. Shen will deliberately widen the space between certain lines or relax the shapes of certain characters, so the eye pauses for a moment. Zhao Puchu often uses “large characters mixed with small ones” or a deliberately tilted column to create rhythmic shifts. In this work, Cao Baolin clearly places more faith in the power of steady advance and is reluctant to play many tricks with the layout.

In contemporary exhibition halls, this choice does not hurt. Works that are unified, orderly, and full of momentum are easier to catch at a distance and fit judges’ expectations for “clear style.” Yet if we approach calligraphy as art, this conservative layout leaves the piece with less “breathing space.” It becomes more like a solid structure than a living body moving across the paper.

Taken together, the greatest strength of this running script is its internal coherence. Brushwork, structure, ink, and layout all revolve around one core temperament: hard, restrained, unified. Almost nothing feels out of line. In today’s calligraphy world this, in fact, is rare. Many exhibition-style works try to look good by collage: a bit of Wang Xizhi here, a touch of Mi Fu there, some Huai Su on top, until no one can see what the foundation really is. At least Cao Baolin plants his roots clearly in the Su Dongpo line and, on that base, creates a highly recognizable personal style.

The weak points are just as obvious. The variation in line is limited; the brush tip is often too sharp; the turns lack roundness. The structures stay within one set of rules for a very long stretch, and the few departures are cautious. The ink method is safe and conservative, with little sense of sudden storms or clearings. The spacing of lines and characters is stable, and the rhythm is relatively single.

All this means that the “re-watch value” of the work suffers somewhat. At first glance it is striking; after several viewings, the surprises are few.

If we walk back to the starting point—Su Dongpo himself—we can see that Su’s own charm lies in a quality that is “loose yet weighty.” In his running script there is a constant sense that he “could make it more regular, but chooses to relax it.” Cao Baolin seems to say the opposite: “Since it can be made strict, it may as well stay strict all the way.” Between holding and letting go stand two very different artistic temperaments.

Looking at how Shen Yinmo and Zhao Puchu carried on Su’s legacy helps to place Cao Baolin on a longer timeline. Shen, who came of age in the late Qing and early Republic, belonged to a generation that re-examined the “Two Wangs” and the “Four Masters of the Song” through the lens of the stele studies fashion. Zhao Puchu was active after the founding of the People’s Republic, juggling political and cultural roles while seeking a “moderate style” of writing.

Cao Baolin’s generation faces a different environment: the institutionalization of exhibitions, the spread of academy training, and the impact of mass media. To walk the “Su Dongpo road” again under these conditions already carries a certain anti-current flavor. Many contemporary calligraphers favor stele styles, wild cursive, or other routes that promise stronger visual impact. Cao chooses instead to dig deep into the relatively “literati” running script. This choice helps explain why his work feels so hard-edged: in an age that prizes visual entertainment, insisting on literati bone is itself a form of resistance.

Cao Baolin on today’s timeline

The value of this running script may lie in more than its technical level. It also raises a question for today’s calligraphy world: under the pressure of exhibitions, markets, and social media, can calligraphy still keep a kind of “untimely seriousness”?

Many exhibition-style works are criticized for having “only the look, no temperament.” For many authors, the first requirement is that their work “grabs the eye” on the judges’ table: the paper should be big, the strokes thick, the style exaggerated, and, if possible, a few strokes should look mysteriously wild. Once this pursuit goes astray, calligraphy easily turns into mere visual decoration.

Cao Baolin’s running script, though clearly written for exhibition spaces, offers a different example. It stays within discipline, stresses its traditional root, and does not rely solely on piled-up visual effects. Even if it is too “hard,” it remains hard within the logic of traditional brushwork and structure, without abandoning basic writing rules.

For today’s practitioners, there are at least three lessons here.

One, style has to be built on “taking from a clear source.” Cao’s hardness is not invented out of thin air. It is distilled from the bony side of Su Dongpo and then overlaid with his own personality. Without long study of the Song masters and of Su’s work in particular, it would be impossible to construct such a relatively complete system.

Two, unity is important, but variation is just as vital. The reason this piece leaves a faint sense of “what a pity” is precisely that it succeeds too well at unifying every level, to the point that it presses down the livelier parts. For the many exhibition-style works that chase an “overall effect,” this is a reminder from the opposite direction: even while keeping a coherent look, one must leave a few “breathing holes”—a handful of unrestrained characters, a few rises and falls in the ink.

Three, personality can enter the writing, but the writing should not become nothing but personality. Cao Baolin’s hardness and straightness are fully reflected here, and this gives the work a clear personal stamp. Yet if one stayed at this single mood for too long, the work would risk seeming capable of only one emotion. Those who take him as a model might better ask how, while preserving bone, to write warmth, humor, stillness, and other tones into the line as well.

Looked at with a stricter eye, this work still has room to open up. In brushwork, while keeping the edge, one could add a few rounded segments so that the line finds subtle inner undulations. In structure, the middle of the piece could hold a few deliberately relaxed characters or lines as visual “rests.” In ink, one or two passages of slightly wetter, heavier strokes could bring in the sense of breath. In composition, a slightly tilted or looser section toward the end could let the whole piece relax after its long tension.

These hopes do not mean turning Cao Baolin into another Shen Yinmo or Zhao Puchu. They point instead to the possibility of carving a few new openings inside the “hard-line Su style” he has already built. Those openings might bring his work closer to Su Dongpo’s original complexity, which could be both hard and self-mocking, both forceful and amused.

From Shen Yinmo to Zhao Puchu and on to Cao Baolin, one can see how a single tradition refracts in different eras. Shen’s writing is like an old-school scholar: refined, yet with hidden cutting edges. Zhao’s resembles a generous elder: rounded, but with an unerring sense of measure. Cao’s feels more like a jutting rock: hard, straight, and unwilling to turn back.

This piece of running script has obvious strengths and equally clear weaknesses. It is not perfect, but it is honest. In a highly formulaic era of exhibition styles, a work that “starts from Su Dongpo and insists on its own stubbornness” is, in itself, something worth holding on to.

Ren Jingjing (任晶晶)

Any discussion of Yu Wenjialin (宇文家林) tends to circle back to two labels: winner of the Lanting Calligraphy Award and a mid-career calligrapher promoted as “upholding the standard while innovating, entering antiquity to emerge with something new.” The promotional text wraps his path in flattering phrases: he began with Mi Fu (米芾), went on to study Jin and Tang modelbooks in depth, devoted himself to the Two Wangs (二王, Wang Xizhi and Wang Xianzhi), and pursues a style “as pure as a lotus rising from clear water, naturally free of ornament.” Such language is everywhere in today’s calligraphy world and has almost hardened into a stock formula. What is more interesting is to set these words aside for a moment and look only at the hanging scroll of running script in front of us, and listen to what it has to say on its own.

The sheet he uses is rather long, with a pronounced vertical thrust, filled with several dozen lines of running script. The overall mood is gentle, neither agitated nor sluggish, written in a medium tempo. Characters are often linked stroke to stroke; the energy of the lines runs straight down, and to the eye it forms a slightly right-leaning “conveyor belt.” The strokes are mostly rounded and full, with occasional dry-brush breaks that never go to the point of harshness. The ink tone is basically medium-dark, with subtle shifts between light and heavy in certain parts. The piece as a whole looks clean, even, and refined. It does not strain after daring strokes, nor does it rely on exaggerated poses. This already sketches out the writer’s taste quite clearly: he prefers steadiness and elegance, refuses roughness, and for the moment stays away from extremes.

In terms of stylistic lineage, this work clearly stands on the line that runs from the Two Wangs through Mi Fu to modern “modelbook” calligraphy. Most structures are slightly elongated, stretched along the vertical axis. Horizontal strokes carry a mild curve. The tops of characters are tightened and the bottoms relaxed. These habits of construction go back, in broad outline, to the way line-energy is organized in the letters of Wang Xizhi’s (王羲之) school. He usually hides the tip of the brush at the start and finish of strokes. There is a twisting motion at the turns. Pressure rises and falls slightly along the middle of the stroke. This is close to the Song-dynasty taste for “idea-centered” calligraphy, where the brush seems to screw its way across the paper. A few slanting characters, with their flaring outward and pulling inward of left and right diagonals, faintly recall the manner of Mi Fu. This is not a straightforward “facsimile” of any single modelbook. It is more like a pot of “mixed soup” made by boiling together familiar Jin and Song patterns, which is then seasoned to suit the taste of contemporary exhibition culture.

This mixed soup has its strengths, yet it also hides some problems. The strength is that the work never feels narrow. The lines have the pliancy of the Jin period and the plumpness of the Song. The structures combine Wang Xizhi’s inward-tucked centers with Mi Fu’s tilting posture. So the whole can appeal to more than one kind of viewer and is very friendly to the general public. From a critic’s angle, though, the risk lies here as well. If the artist’s choices are not sharp enough, what remains in the end is a “safe antiqueness”: nothing convincingly looks like any one master, and a strong sense of self does not quite emerge.

In its handling of character forms, this piece has two virtues worth pointing out. First, the center of gravity is well controlled overall. Most characters can hold to the central axis in that tall, narrow format, without drifting outward too easily, and this gives the flow of the lines a stable main spine. Second, the play of solid and void is fairly thoughtful. Wherever a stroke flings itself out, he knows to rein in somewhere else, pulling the force inward again through short horizontals and hooked verticals. This give-and-take—“release an inch, pull back an inch”—shows solid basic training. It is not just a burst of emotion charging blindly across the page.

The weaknesses are just as visible. Many characters have internal structures that feel somewhat monotonous. The gaps between horizontal strokes are almost identical, and the opening angles of left-and-right diagonals do not vary much. When the reader reaches the middle of the scroll, there is a sense that similar postures are repeating over and over. Formulaic ways of writing common characters are hard to avoid in running script. The higher level of craft, though, lies in playing with fine differences inside the same formula. The same “xin” (心) can be slightly squashed or slightly stretched. The same “yan” (言) can bow its head or hold it high. What appears here, instead, is a long stretch of text using roughly the same “template.” Such templates are not forbidden, but if the whole scroll leans on them too heavily, the energy of the piece tends to flatten out and loses its rise and fall.

As for brushwork, Yu Wenjialin clearly favors “center-tip strokes with a touch of side-tip.” Most lines avoid extremes. The brush tip does not stick out boldly at the start. Strokes more often reverse inward and then turn back. While moving across the paper, the wrist supports the brush quite steadily, so there are few ultra-thin, knife-sharp strokes. At the end of strokes he either tucks inward or gently lets the tip slip out, seldom sweeping straight off in a fractured way. The result is that the lines look round and mellow and can easily produce what people like to call “steel wrapped in cotton.” From another angle, however, the shortcoming is easy to spot: there is little real danger in them. Most turns follow the natural curve of movement and rarely go against the grain. There is pressure-and-release, but it often stays at the level of mild changes in thickness. The more abrupt rhythms—a sudden pause, a surprise flick—do not show up very often. Over time, the viewer starts to feel that these lines never step out of a safety zone.

His handling of ink is consistent with this choice of brushwork. There are almost no large stretches of dry brush in the entire piece, and no stubborn clots of burned-out ink. The gradations of tone are smooth, like a soup carefully stirred until no clumps of powder remain. For competition pieces this is a very secure strategy. No one can accuse the work of being coarse, and no one can say it is affectedly parched. The problem is that the ink is neither very dry nor very wet, so it lacks the tension that comes with pushing things to the edge. The charm of Jin-dynasty calligraphy depends in part on how often the ink is driven to its limits—with one stroke so saturated it almost drips, and another so light it skims the paper like a dragonfly. Here, the way ink is used is proper and disciplined. It is pleasant to look at, yet not very thrilling.

In composition, this scroll follows a standard exhibition layout. The top margin is left wide. The main text runs in several vertical columns from right to left, with even spaces between the lines. The ups and downs from line to line stay within a gentle range. The column of signature at the end shrinks inward slightly, and two seals help pull the viewer’s gaze back in. Looking at any single area, it is hard to find serious faults. Taken as a whole, though, the piece can give the feeling of “reasoning with you from beginning to end.” The kinds of page design that really move people in long letter-scrolls usually change rhythm at some point: either the characters suddenly spread out and open the breathing space, or they crowd together in a block and press the emotion down. In this work, shifts in rhythm are kept very cautious. Characters do differ in size, lines do differ in height, but the overall fluctuation stays inside a “safe range for the exhibition hall” and never truly breaks through what the audience expects.

If we weigh strengths and weaknesses together, this running-script work stands for a very representative type among today’s mid-career calligraphers. Their traditional training is thorough. They have spent long hours at the desk. They have deeply absorbed the brush-intent of the Two Wangs and the postures of Mi Fu. At the same time, they know the exhibition system inside out and understand what kind of “lawfulness,” what kind of “elegance,” what kind of “gold content” juries prefer. The virtues of the piece are reliability and durability. Its flaws lie in a certain lack of edge and risk. It would be unfair to say it has no personality, yet that personality is carefully wrapped in antique refinement and does not show its sharp corners easily.

Using this work as an entry point, one can see a typical point of balance in contemporary calligraphy between inheriting the classical and seeking modernity. On the surface, the calligraphy scene now repeats a stable slogan: “Tradition as the foundation; uphold the standard while innovating.” In practice, “tradition” is often reduced to a certain visual style taken from Jin and Tang modelbooks. “Innovation” means small adjustments to line and composition inside a safe frame, so that the work will look “cleaner” and “more relaxed” than that of the previous generation. This tendency is less about modernity than about creating a “classical feeling suited to modern exhibition spaces.” When visitors walk into a museum and see row upon row of hanging running-script scrolls of similar temperament, they feel at ease, but it is hard for any one piece to seize them and not let go.

Real modernity does not have to show up as distorted letter shapes or extreme page designs. What matters more is how much of the era’s experience the work can take in and express. From Yu Wenjialin’s running script, almost no such traces can be seen. The temperament of the lines stays within a long extension of “Jin people—Song people—modern masters of the modelbook school.” It is genuinely refined, yet it keeps a safe distance from the tension, fracture, and speed of contemporary life. Writing does not need to pander to reality. Still, if it floats entirely outside reality and only circles in the world of the ancients, the word “modernity” is hard to justify.

The real issue is not whether one should learn from the past but how. Yu Wenjialin has followed a very classic path of “ploughing the old methods in depth and moving forward step by step.” He immersed himself in Mi Fu early on, then turned to the Two Wangs. He has copied modelbooks for years, day after day. This training method is beyond reproach in itself. It is, in fact, the basic form of respect owed to the classics. The key question is whether, after copying, one dares to subtract. What the Two Wangs and Mi Fu left later generations is not only the specific way to write each stroke. It is also a way of handling space, rhythm, and emotion. If they are treated simply as a “character bank,” and pretty shapes are transferred one by one, the result will always be a carefully edited anthology, and not a text that truly belongs to the present.

Seen in this light, the running-script work has already gone halfway. It is no longer a direct replica of one single model. It absorbs features from several masters and forges a unified style. The other half of the road has yet to be traveled. A genuine personal hand usually requires a non-negotiable choice at some point. One might radically alter the structural habits of the ancients. One might keep a deliberate trace of “awkwardness” in the lines instead of pursuing perfect smoothness. One might bring much more violent shifts of rhythm into the page so that the emotions, anxieties, anger, or coldness of people today seep into the work. Without such refusal to compromise, a personal style tends to stop at the stage of “the taste of the ancients is just right, but the personal flavor is rather light.”

From the angle of cultural ecology, it is not hard to see why contemporary calligraphy often settles into this moderate balance. The broader institutional setting plays a large part. Major exhibitions, award systems, and official discourse all encourage a kind of “controllable classicism.” Forms that are too extreme and emotions that are too strong have a hard time passing safely through juries. Any calligrapher who wants a stable professional path must respond to these aesthetic expectations. A Lanting Award winner like Yu Wenjialin cannot possibly be unaware of this. The gentleness and steadiness of this piece are, to a considerable degree, his response to that mechanism.

Against this background, it is hard to offer a simple formula for the “aesthetic balance between inheritance and innovation.” To abandon the classical entirely and rush into radical formal experiments is to step outside the very context of the calligraphic tradition. To cling tightly to the legs of the Two Wangs and Mi Fu is to repeat oneself forever in their shadow. For those who truly want to write the present, one possible path is to stand on deep classical training while keeping a keen sense of one’s own historical moment, and to turn that experience into decisions about rhythm, density, and force. In other words, the strokes can still come from the Two Wangs, the composition can still follow Jin-Tang patterns, yet the emotions and the questions embodied in the work must belong to today.

On this point, Yu Wenjialin’s scroll still hovers in a somewhat hazy zone. It proves how solid the writer’s classical training is. It also proves how precisely he grasps the “mainstream taste” of the present book world. What it has not yet shown is a strong awareness of the times. In the comments under the original post someone wrote, “There is no self here. Without personality and recognizability, this kind of existence is meaningless.” The words are harsh, yet they touch a real nerve. For a calligrapher already decorated with prizes and seasoned by decades at the inkstone, the crucial question is no longer how many more awards to win. It is whether viewers, looking at a wall of works, can pick out one at a glance and say, “This is Yu Wenjialin,” and mean by that a breath that cannot be neatly filed under any existing “school.”

For contemporary calligraphy, the true aesthetic balance point may not lie in repeating the slogan of “upholding the standard and breaking new ground.” It may lie in the courage to treat the classical as a tool rather than a talisman. The value of the Two Wangs and Mi Fu does not rest in providing a safe public face. It lies in showing later generations how a limited set of black lines and blank spaces can bear the complex weight of an age. Yu Wenjialin’s running script has already built a firm classical frame. What it has not yet done is place the present moment fully inside that frame. This is where its safety lies—and also where its deepest regret remains.

Ren Jingjing (任晶晶)

Online, a set of screenshots has been labeled as the “Letter with a Poem Sent to Wei Tai” (《寄魏泰诗帖》), “attributed to Mi Fu” (米芾) and “in the collection of the Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne, Germany” (德国科隆东亚艺术博物馆). Looking only at these phone screenshots, the best one can do is to take apart where it resembles Mi Fu and where it does not, and see how convincing the attribution really is. When it comes to authenticity, two habits are especially dangerous: judging only by the famous name, and judging only by emotion. However prestigious the name, it cannot cover up clumsy brushwork. However strong the feeling, it cannot replace evidence.

Without seeing the original scroll—without the physical object, the aging of paper and ink, the colophons, the textual records, and the chain of provenance—it is irresponsible to nail down a verdict of “genuine” or “fake.” But that does not mean that, just because the information is incomplete, nothing at all can be said. In calligraphy, many flaws are structural. Even through a screen, one can still make out the general pattern.

What Is the “Underlying Mechanism” of Mi Fu’s Running Script

The key to Mi Fu’s running script is not simply that it looks “dashing” or “free.” What really matters are three hard things.

The first is the speed structure of the brushwork. Where it should be fast, it is truly fast; where it should be slow, it is truly slow. Fast does not mean floating; slow does not mean dragging. Lifting and pressing, turning and changing direction, releasing and reining in—each of these has a clear rhythm.

The second is a clear path of the brush tip. Mi Fu often begins with a side stroke and then moves into a centered stroke; when he turns at a crucial point, he can still rein the tip back in. The edges of his lines are usually clean. Even when there are dry, broken strokes, they are the result of vigorous movement, not of weak, airy mush.

The third is that his character structures lean and tilt, yet remain stable in themselves. Mi Fu famously loves slant and danger, but his danger is “danger without collapse.” Inside the character there is hidden support. However far left or right, up or down a stroke may go, there is always a force that holds the whole shape together.

So when looking at a work “attributed to Mi Fu,” the first question should not be whether it resembles the appearance of some particular Mi Fu piece. The first question should be whether its brushwork, the path of the tip, and its structure obey Mi Fu’s set of “physics.” That is what it means to look from the underlying level up.

First Problem: Lines That Are Too Dull and Often Drag

Start with the clearest parts in the screenshots. Take the character “塘” for instance. The ink is very heavy, there are ink clots at the turns, the edges of the lines are blurred, and many of the endings are blunt. The main strokes of “塘” are very heavy, as if the brush were pressed down and then slowly dragged out. Places that should be sharp are not sharp; places that should be crisp are not crisp.

The character “明” shows obvious pauses in its breaks and turns. It feels as if the writer is “posing the shape” rather than driving through it in one sustained motion. This kind of thing is very common in copies. Afraid of making mistakes, the copyist slows down, and once the speed drops, ink clots, dragging strokes, and fuzzy edges tend to appear.

Of course Mi Fu also uses rich, heavy ink, but his heavy ink still lets you see the path of the tip. You can feel the energy of the brush “sweeping” across the paper. Here, the impression is closer to “getting the shape done safely,” not “the storm in the wrist.”

Look again at the line with “厌奴書不……” The characters “書” and “不” are both written thickly, but the thickness feels clogged. In “不,” the relationship between its strokes is stiff, as if the brush were pressed onto the paper to “press out the shape,” instead of lifting and pressing to send out momentum. When that happens, the whole piece easily slides from running script toward semi-regular script.

In short: the lines here lack that sense in Mi Fu where “the tip of the brush runs across the paper.” What we see instead is “ink spread out on the paper.”

Second Problem: Component Forms That Feel Strange, as if the Font Has Changed

The left component of “诗”—the speech radical “讠”—is awkward. In the column where we read “诗乃”, the left side of “诗” is drawn fairly straight and simple, like a single line pulled straight down. There are not many turns, and the ending is soft. When Mi Fu writes this speech radical, one usually sees clear changes of lifting and pressing between the dot and the rising stroke. The brush idea is tighter, and the finishing is more decisive.

Here, the “讠” looks more like the later habit of semi-regular script: clarity first, sharpness second. One cannot decide life and death on the strength of a single character, of course, but it leads to one direct result: within the same work, the “grammar” of components is not unified. Mi Fu’s characters can vary immensely, yet the underlying grammar is consistent. In these screenshots, some strokes feel as though they belong to a different system of writing.

The endings of “门” and “月” look clumsy. On the right side of one screenshot, we can see “都门”. In “都,” the ink is very heavy and the structure looks cramped. In “门,” the last few strokes are especially telling: the lines are straight and rigid, the turns are not rounded or lively, and the ending of the strokes feels like a stab that gets stuck. Mi Fu’s “门” is commonly driven by wrist power through the turns; it does not look this wooden.

This kind of woodenness is typical in copies. The writer is afraid of slipping or letting the structure fall apart, so every stroke is spelled out and over-secured.

Third Problem: The Risk in the Structure Is Not “Mi-Style Risk,” but Simple Imbalance

Mi Fu’s “risk” often takes the form of “left-leaning with right-hand support,” or a tilt above with reinforcement below. The characters look slanted, but inside they are steady. In the few columns visible in the screenshots, the problem is that some imbalances look like genuine loss of balance, not deliberate risk.

Two points stand out directly from the screenshots. In one place, the character “長” is overall too heavy, and the center of gravity is not agile. At the end of the stroke, the momentum is not carried out; instead, it seems to fall and press downward. When Mi Fu writes “長,” the last stroke usually carries the energy forward. Even when it pauses or jerks, it still sends the breath outward. Here the feeling is more “write to this point and stop.”

In the same column that contains “诗乃,” the character “乃” has relatively thin lines, which do not match the heavier strokes of the “诗” above it. The echo between the two characters, top and bottom, is broken. In Mi Fu’s writing, he often uses a balance of light and heavy to maintain the flow of a column. Here, it feels more like each character is written on its own.

As for more specific shapes such as “髪” and “驚,” in the original scroll these characters really do show obvious imbalance between upper and lower parts; “憶” and “都” are lopsided left-to-right; “故” even shows the two sides colliding with each other. These are the sort of problems one expects from beginners, and they sharply reduce the likelihood of a genuine work by Mi Fu. Mi Fu can be wild and eccentric, but it is rare to see him repeatedly fail at such basic balances.

Layout and Line Rhythm: More Like Assembled Vertical Columns Than a Single Breath of Writing

To look at Mi Fu, one must look not only at individual characters but also at line rhythm. The overall impression given by the fragments in these screenshots is that the relationships between characters are weak.

Many characters simply “stand in their own places,” without much pull on one another. The spacing between the columns is fairly even. There is little slanting of the columns, and not much linking between strokes from one character to the next. Once running script reaches a certain level, a very natural phenomenon appears: the ending of the previous character draws out the beginning of the next. Even if the strokes are not actually joined, there is a hidden line of force. Here that hidden line is weak. It feels more as if separate characters have been arranged into vertical lines.

This also explains the earlier sense of “dragging” and “dullness.” When the writer’s main goal is “to write clearly and make it look close enough,” the brush tends to slow down. Once it slows, the movement gets blocked; once blocked, the writing becomes wooden. The atmosphere of the entire piece then shifts away from a literati letter and toward a neat, careful copy.

Within the narrow frame of these screenshots, this so-called “Letter with a Poem Sent to Wei Tai” displays many features that do not match the underlying mechanics of Mi Fu’s running script: the lines are dull, dragging strokes and ink clots are frequent, many component forms feel strange, the pull between characters is weak, and the whole looks more like a carefully written semi-regular copy than a spontaneous running script. All of this greatly lowers the credibility of the claim that it is Mi Fu’s own hand.

If a piece that claims to be a personal letter by Mi Fu cannot stand up on the two most essential points—the path of the brush tip and the rhythm of the line—then what is left to support those two characters “Mi Fu”?

Ren Jingjing （任晶晶）

When people mention Wang Xizhi (王羲之), most think first of the Preface to the Orchid Pavilion (《兰亭序》). It was a gathering of literati, later praised as “the finest running script under heaven,” grand in scale and almost mythologized. By contrast, Letter on a Clear Day after Fast Snow (《快雪时晴帖》) is strikingly short, just a little over twenty characters, and shows another side altogether: not a lofty inscription, but a casual greeting between friends.

The version that survives today is a Tang-dynasty tracing copy. After it entered the Qing imperial collection, Emperor Qianlong (乾隆) ranked it as one of the “Three Rarities” (三希) and covered it with seals. The content is simple: the snow has stopped and the sky has cleared, the weather is turning fine; the writer sends regards to a friend and his family, notes that a planned meeting did not take place, and looks forward to another get-together. Turn it into today’s chat message and hardly anyone would give it a second glance. Yet precisely this bit of everyday talk, in Wang Xizhi’s hand, later generations treated as a model of running script.

Placing the Preface to the Orchid Pavilion and Letter on a Clear Day after Fast Snow side by side helps clarify Wang Xizhi’s true stature. The Preface displays large-scale composition and momentum. Letter on a Clear Day after Fast Snow draws the gaze back to daily life. In the compact format of a personal letter, it shows the writer’s usual touch and breathing. This state of “written in passing” says even more about a calligrapher’s skill than a grand piece crafted with great effort.

Jin-Dynasty Elegance as Reflected in a Tang Copy

The strokes in the Preface to the Orchid Pavilion tend to be thin yet forceful, with clear lifts and presses, and turns pulled along like trailing silk, giving a sense of constant “flowing away.” Letter on a Clear Day after Fast Snow is much more restrained. Its lines are slightly fuller, the brush no longer swings left and right in a showy way, and the overall movement gains a layer of inwardness.

Most of the brushwork in this letter follows the central-tip method. Many strokes begin with hidden points of entry; at the turns there are few exaggerated flicks, more often a slight circling of the brush on the paper. Take the characters for “snow” (雪) and “clear” (晴): the vertical strokes descend with a faint rhythm of pause and push; the final tips draw back a little, leaving no muddy tails yet preserving a trace of aftertaste. This way of writing keeps the usual lightness of Jin-dynasty calligraphy, while adding warmth and calm.

Judged by the quality of the lines, Letter on a Clear Day after Fast Snow hardly contains any “coarse strokes” that expose brute force. The whole piece is written in one breath. Variations in thickness stay within tiny margins: slightly heavier strokes anchor the structure; slightly lighter ones let the breath of the piece come through. Unlike later Tang calligraphy, which often favors angular, sharply defined strokes, Jin lines are closer to human body temperature, as if fingers were walking across the paper instead of a knife cutting into it.

Because of this reserve, some people feel that Letter on a Clear Day after Fast Snow is less “breathtaking” than the Preface to the Orchid Pavilion. From the standpoint of skill, however, bringing a short everyday letter to the level of “quiet but flavorful” is no easier than composing a “masterpiece for the ages.”

In the Preface to the Orchid Pavilion, the shapes of the characters vary greatly. Some are tight, some loose; some are tall and slender, others squat and level. The overall rhythm resembles a long poem. Letter on a Clear Day after Fast Snow, by contrast, is short and its content serene, so its character structure is correspondingly restrained.

The main tendency is balanced forms with a touch of slant. In most characters the central space is slightly compact. The left and right components are not pulled excessively wide. In characters such as “time” (时), “clear” (晴), and “fine” (佳), the width is kept within a stable range. This treatment gives the whole work a state of “level but not stiff”: it does not seek danger for its own sake, nor does it chase after flamboyant poses.

Of course, if a letter were entirely level, it would become dull. Wang Xizhi still arranged a few slanted movements in the details. For example, in the character “think” (想) in the phrase “fine thoughts, peace and well-being” (佳想安善), the left “heart” (心) component leans out a little, while the vertical in the right “mutual” (相) slants gently down toward the right, creating a dynamic balance of tight inside and loose outside. The final signature “Xizhi” (羲之) in the last line is slightly compact, and the ending stroke is gathered neatly without a trailing tail, bringing the letter to a clean close. These small tilts and tightenings hold up the rhythm of the whole piece.

Some argue that the structures in Letter on a Clear Day after Fast Snow are overly cautious and lack the bold structural experiments seen in the Preface to the Orchid Pavilion. This view is understandable. Compared with the Preface, the letter does lean toward “everyday characters,” with almost no strikingly unconventional forms. Yet precisely because of this, it comes closer to the “daily-use writing” between regular and running script, and it is therefore more suitable as a basic model for later learners.

The letter was originally written as a piece of correspondence of modest size, later cut and mounted as a hanging scroll. Its layout follows the typical Jin-dynasty pattern for personal letters: vertical lines somewhat sparse, character spacing relaxed, with blank space between lines. Each line holds roughly four or five characters. There are only a handful of lines in all, and the text can be taken in at a glance.

The subtlety of the composition lies in this “leaving of space.” Letter on a Clear Day after Fast Snow lacks the strictly regimented format of later Song and Ming small regular-script works. Instead, the spacing between the lines is allowed slight shifts: some lines are a bit tighter, others a bit looser, like speech that speeds up and slows down. The first and last lines draw inward ever so slightly, gathering the viewer’s gaze along the central axis so that, after reading, the eye naturally returns to the signature and completes the act of reading.

Compared with the long-scroll, wave-like composition of the Preface to the Orchid Pavilion, Letter on a Clear Day after Fast Snow is more like a short sentence. It has no grand rises and falls in structure, only a steady opening, middle, and close. The advantage is an easy, natural feeling; the limitation is that its scope is modest and it is hard for it to carry much “cultural imagination.”

One more point is hard to ignore: the damage done to the visual effect of the composition by later emperors’ excessive seals. Qianlong’s many impressions crowd the originally clear open spaces almost to bursting. This “adding flowers to brocade” now looks more like stealing the show. It also reminds later viewers that no matter how fine a cherished work may be, it cannot withstand endless “consumption.”

Because what survives is a Tang tracing, the ink naturally bears the stamp of Tang aesthetic taste. The ink tone is rich but not rigid, with delicate shifts between wet and dry. At the start and end of certain strokes, there are natural dry-brush marks and slight bleeding, which may differ somewhat from the Jin original, yet the overall feeling still tends toward warmth, not severity.

The paper is a deep brown, with slightly coarse fibers and the mottling that comes from old paper weathered over time. This ground, set off against the not-too-shiny black ink, creates a warm contrast: it carries a sense of time and avoids the harsh glare of stark black on bright white that many later works show.

For today’s viewers, one lesson from the ink in this piece is clear: good calligraphy does not rely on “inky black shine” to show power. The layers within each line, the seeping of ink, and the interplay between paper and ink matter much more than a simple black-and-white clash.

Even a Famous Work Is Not a Perfect Myth

Taking lines, structure, composition, and ink together, the strengths of Letter on a Clear Day after Fast Snow can be summed up in several points.

First, it carries a strong sense of everyday life. The text is extremely plain, without any pile-up of classical phrases, yet the act of writing gives off a feeling of steadiness and warmth. This mood is different from the slightly tipsy, slightly proud stance in the Preface to the Orchid Pavilion. It feels more like a middle-aged man, on a clear afternoon after snow, writing a short note to a friend.

Second, skill is hidden rather than flaunted. There are almost no deliberately showy strokes, no dramatic twists, no exaggerated flying white. The craftsmanship appears in small, subtle places. For readers with some grounding, this is much more enduring than pages filled with “dragons flying and phoenixes dancing.”

Third, rule and temperament coexist. The character structures are stable; the fundamentals of horizontal and vertical strokes hold up. At the same time, a few characters tilt slightly, keeping the entire piece alive. This sense of proportion is one of the hallmarks of Jin calligraphy.

Of course, this renowned work is not without its limits.

To begin with, the piece is very short. With only a little over twenty characters, it cannot unfold rich variations in composition, nor can it show complex emotions. Because of this, later interpretations easily slide into “myth-making,” reading endless hidden meanings into a small amount of information.

Next, the structures as a whole are relatively conservative. Compared with the highly tense forms in works such as Preface to the Orchid Pavilion or Letter on Mourning and Turmoil (《丧乱帖》), Letter on a Clear Day after Fast Snow is more a set of well-regulated everyday characters. For those seeking breakthroughs, it offers more of a basic paradigm than an extreme challenge.

Finally, the “Tang flavor” of the tracing never quite goes away. In certain turns and presses, the copyist has brought in Tang habits, making some strokes slightly fuller. Learners who want to use this piece to reconstruct Wang Xizhi’s brushwork in full need to keep this in mind.

Even so, as one of the “Three Rarities,” Letter on a Clear Day after Fast Snow has had an obvious influence on later calligraphers. From the Song and Yuan onward, almost all calligraphers who consciously followed the line of the “Two Wangs” (二王) practiced this letter.

When Zhao Mengfu (赵孟頫) tried to revive “Jin style,” he gave particular weight to the calm and dignified air of Letter on a Clear Day after Fast Snow. In his own running script, the structures clearly borrow from this piece’s “tight center with relaxed edges”: the characters are somewhat flattened yet do not lose the strength of the central space. Around the Song–Yuan transition, scholar-officials longed for inner composure in troubled times. The mood of Letter on a Clear Day after Fast Snow suited that desire perfectly.

Later Ming and Qing calligraphers such as Wen Zhengming (文徵明), Dong Qichang (董其昌), and Wang Duo (王铎) also drew nourishment from this letter. Wen’s small running script, dense and meticulous, develops largely along the rules embodied in this piece. Dong advocated “plainness and naturalness” and praised “harmonious balance”; this aesthetic stance aligns closely with the mood of Letter on a Clear Day after Fast Snow. Wang Duo may look bold on the surface, but underneath he still relies on the basic line organization of the “Two Wangs.”

Even in the modern era, calligraphers like Qi Gong (启功) have treated this letter as a standard entry-level model for running script, using it to train students’ inner control of the line. In this sense, although Letter on a Clear Day after Fast Snow does not blaze across the sky like the Preface to the Orchid Pavilion, it resembles a warm stream that has long nourished the tradition of writing.

The Break Between Letter-Writing, “Exhibition Script,” “Ugly Script,” and “Roguish Script”

Looking back at today’s calligraphy scene through Letter on a Clear Day after Fast Snow, the gap is obvious. Jin-dynasty calligraphy, at its core, was “writing characters,” a tool for everyday communication. Much of today’s calligraphy has turned into “exhibition pieces,” written for walls and for prizes—this is contemporary “exhibition script.”

Letter-writing calligraphy seeks natural breathing. The spacing between characters follows the tone of the words; weight and speed change with the content. A person writing a letter will not thicken every stroke and stretch every line just so judges ten meters away feel “shocked.” On the contrary, the writer thinks about whether the sheet fits the hand, whether the reader will feel comfortable, and whether the message is clear. “Exhibition script” often turns this upside down. To catch the eye, strokes are thickened without restraint, the composition is blown up, and the whole surface is filled. From afar the momentum looks huge; up close there is only repeated pounding and affected flying white. The lines have no inner rhythm, only a show of muscle.

Letter on a Clear Day after Fast Snow reminds contemporary calligraphers that calligraphy is first of all written words, not paintings to be hung. Only the hand that has been trained in real situations—letters, colophons, notes—can support running script with real life in it. If one abandons everyday writing and heads straight for “entering exhibitions” and “winning prizes,” that path runs in the opposite direction from the Jin tradition.

In recent years, disputes over “ugly script” have surged. Some works, under the banner of “innovation,” deliberately twist characters into symbols and even damage their forms until they can barely be recognized. Set beside Jin calligraphy, the fundamental differences stand out at once.

Calligraphers of the Jin valued the natural beauty of lines, the inner balance of structure, and the stretch and contraction of composition. All this rests on solid brush technique: hidden and exposed tips, turns, lifts, and presses, each stroke with a clear origin. Only with this foundation can one speak of “freedom” and “temperament.”

Much so-called “ugly script” walks the other way. Without adequate training, it chases “personality” and “impact” first, writing crooked on purpose and using extreme shapes to grab attention. The lines lack bone; the structures lack center; the layout has no overall plan. What remains is posture and slogan-like “statements.”

Though plain, Letter on a Clear Day after Fast Snow tells today’s writers a simple truth: genuine “personal style” is not piled up by force; it appears naturally after tradition has been thoroughly absorbed. Wang Xizhi himself only found his own path after long practice of masters like Zhong Yao (钟繇) and Wei Guan (卫瓘). Zhao Mengfu and Dong Qichang were no exception. “Ugliness” without a foundation is mere empty posing; “awkwardness” with deep roots can become a new kind of beauty.

After the Jin, most calligraphers who took the art seriously followed a common route. They began with steles and model books, copying widely. On that basis they chose one line that suited their own temperament and worked it through repeatedly. Only then could they talk about “forming a school of their own.”

Letter on a Clear Day after Fast Snow works well at the entry stage largely because its rules are complete but not rigid. Students who copy it can learn the steadiness of central-tip brushwork and the mutual response between characters. Once they have built up enough accumulation, they can return to grand works like the Preface to the Orchid Pavilion. By then they will not only see the surface “flight” of the brush, but also understand its “sense of measure.”

What is called “roguish script” (江湖体) takes shortcuts. Without years at the desk, some look at a few pictures on social media, imitate as they please, feel that their writing “has a certain flavor,” then start charging for lessons and publishing copybooks. At first glance these pieces seem to have “style”; look more closely and there is no support from classical brushwork. The lines float without bone, the structures sag without strength, and the layout is chaotic and ungrounded.

True creation is never simple negation of tradition. It is built on deep understanding of tradition. Behind Letter on a Clear Day after Fast Snow stand decades of Wang Xizhi’s work with brush and ink, and his absorption and digestion of earlier rules. Anyone today who wants to carve out a path—whether toward “new beauty” or “experimental writing,” or back toward “classical styles”—cannot bypass this point.

The Right Road for Contemporary Calligraphy Seen through Letter on a Clear Day after Fast Snow

Set against today’s calligraphy environment, Letter on a Clear Day after Fast Snow offers several reminders about the “right road.”

Return to the line itself. A line is not simply “thick” or “thin”; it results from the combined effect of speed, pressure, and direction. Jin-style lines resemble a human pulse, with strong and weak beats, pauses, and turns. If today’s writing relies only on nib size and contrast of ink tone, it loses the core of calligraphy.

Put calligraphy back into everyday life. Letters, colophons, brief notes, and informal jottings are all suitable scenes for practicing running script. Only when the writer is expressing real content can rhythm arise naturally, instead of being a mere pose.

Respect tradition without being bound by it. Copying Letter on a Clear Day after Fast Snow is not about reproducing twenty-odd characters exactly. It is about grasping how Jin calligraphers handled ordinary content with the brush. Once this logic is understood, it can be carried into one’s own writing in daily life, rather than stopping at the level of “copy-book small regular script.”

Beware the lure of “exhibition script” and “roguish script.” The former replaces mastery of characters with “wall impact”; the latter replaces classical grounding with personal posing. Though they seem to take different roads, both drift farther and farther from the essence of calligraphy.

Letter on a Clear Day after Fast Snow speaks of fine weather after snow. For today’s readers, the letter itself has already crossed sixteen hundred years of wind and frost. It is neither Wang Xizhi’s most thrilling work nor his most grand piece of running script, yet in a simple personal letter it sets the fundamentals of calligraphy—line, structure, rhythm, and breath—in place with quiet assurance.

Compared with the Preface to the Orchid Pavilion, it is less “dazzling” and more “credible.” That credibility lets later generations see a living writer, not only a deified “Sage of Calligraphy.”

In today’s calligraphy world, some deliberately play at ugliness. Some are busy chasing exhibitions. Some are in a hurry to “found a school.” Letter on a Clear Day after Fast Snow offers a plain answer: first write the characters well, then talk about style; first find steadiness in everyday writing, then seek novelty in larger works.

A brief letter of greeting after snow has finally become a small mirror by which later ages can measure their own paths in calligraphy. Whoever is willing to pause before this mirror and look a little longer is more likely to find a road that neither betrays tradition nor gives up the self.

RenJingjing

The calligraphy in this phone screenshot carries the title The “Second Uncle” Letter (《二大爷尺牍》). The text is a short, down-to-earth exchange: “Uncle, what are you thinking about when you’re at a wedding? — I’m thinking: why aren’t they serving the food yet?” A village joke is written out in running script as if it were a private letter, mounted on a narrow, vertical hanging scroll. The words are light; the paper and ink are serious. That contrast makes the viewer smile first, then look again.

The work was probably done by an artist who signs as Mowen (默文). Judging from the piece, the artist has received fairly systematic training in the tradition, and knows the line of Su Dongpo (苏东坡) and Mi Fu (米芾) in running script very well. The brush habits are already his own; this is not a hobbyist who has copied postures for only a few years. Of course, the work has its flaws. The structure of characters and the overall layout, in particular, still show obvious problems. As a whole, it comes from someone with real grounding and personality, but still in the process of being polished.

A Letter-Like Composition: Narrow Format, Long Lines, Large but Uncrowded Characters (尺牍气十足的构图：窄幅、长行、字大而不拥挤)

Start with the layout. The piece is mounted as a hanging scroll, but it breathes more like a handwritten letter. The sheet is relatively narrow and long, with only a few lines—roughly four lines of text and one of signature. Each line has only three to five characters, written fairly large, with generous gaps between the lines. This kind of arrangement is very close to the “wide lines, big characters” structure Su Dongpo and Mi Fu favored in their letters: the writing is not dense, the air is open, and the energy of the lines is allowed to run on its own.

The strengths here are obvious. First, the reading is easy; the eye takes in each phrase at a glance. A joke written in this format feels like someone speaking in a courtyard—no need to raise the voice, yet the sound carries. Second, with big characters and few lines, the artist’s brush paths and turns are fully exposed. This is a bonus for someone with real skill, and a fatal test for someone posing for effect.

The problems also show up here. The “weight” of the different lines is not well balanced. On the right, characters like “Second Uncle” are heavy: more strokes, darker ink, the line’s mass piled toward the top. The left-hand line with the signature is clearly lighter, and it sits farther out, with a rather wide gap from the main text. The two central lines use simpler characters and have fewer dark ink clusters; there is no dominant character to anchor the center of gravity. Seen from a distance, the upper right is the most eye-catching, and the lower left feels a bit empty. It is an easy, casual emptiness, but still a long way from deliberate, shaped blank space.

Compared with Su Shi’s (苏轼) Cold Food Observance Letter (《寒食帖》) or Clouds at the Edge of Heaven Letter (《天际乌云帖》), the difference is clear. Su also wrote large characters in loose lines, but in each line he placed several key big characters to create visual rise and fall and echoes across the scroll. In the last line he often dropped one or two strokes that “hit the ground,” pulling the viewer’s eye back to the center and keeping it from sliding off the picture. In this respect, The “Second Uncle” Letter still lacks a certain sense of overall design.

In the Rough, Wild Strokes, Traces of Mi Fu’s Round Turns (粗头乱服的脉络里，藏着米芾的圆与翻)

Now look at the brushwork. Across the piece the lines are on the thick side. Many strokes open with exposed tips; there is a strong flavor of the old phrase “thick heads, wild robes,” forceful and slightly unruly. Horizontal strokes usually enter the paper from the side of the brush tip, quickly turn to the center and drag to the right; the ending suddenly halts, then flicks up a small tail. Vertical strokes press down heavily, descend slowly, hesitate a little in the middle, then lift sharply to finish in a knife-like point. This treatment naturally evokes Su Shi’s large running-script characters from his middle and late years.

But calling it simply “in the manner of Su” is not enough. Characters in the middle of the text—like the ones for “wedding,” “think,” and “what”—show clear traces of Mi Fu’s turning brush. At the corners of strokes the brush tip deliberately loops a small circle; the lines are rounded and resilient, like a rope swung out and dropped. This feeling is obvious in the heart-radical of “think” and the “woman” component of “wedding.” Mi Fu often handled his strokes this way in his letters. One of the hallmarks of his writing is that the turns are round and lively rather than stiff. In local details, this work manages to catch that quality.

The advantage is that the lines are alive. They have spring and are not dull. The artist clearly dares to write fast, is not afraid of exposed tips, and does not mind the occasional flying white. The changes in ink density in certain parts are also fairly natural, not the mechanical thick lines produced by one unbroken heavy stroke.

The weakness comes from the same place. Some of the flipping and looping strokes feel a bit showy, as if the writer is consciously displaying skill. The rhythm is too fast, the inner force not quite enough, and as a result the skeleton of some characters gets pulled loose. The right half of the character for “wedding” drags slightly; the horizontal strokes in the “altar” component of “ritual” stretch too far and throw the weight outward to the right; the lower part of “dish” is closed off in haste, with the last sweeping stroke not really “landing,” just hanging in mid-air. These details show the artist pushing toward Mi Fu’s “tilt for beauty,” but without enough energy or firmness in the bones. Risk turns into drift. Put simply: the courage with the brush is already there; the sense of measure still needs work.

How Su’s Breadth and Mi’s Tilt Meet Here (苏的宽博和米的欹侧，在这里怎样合流)

From the structure of the characters, the main inheritance from Su’s writing lies in their breadth and flatness. Many characters are stretched sideways, especially “wedding,” “ritual,” and the characters in “wedding ceremony” and “time.” Their horizontal spread is noticeably greater than their vertical height. This treatment gives an open, relaxed feeling and keeps the forms from looking like “blown-up regular script.” Much of Su Shi’s running script relies on this wide, elongated structure to hold the composition.

On this base, the artist adds Mi Fu’s tilt. Many characters do not stand upright but lean slightly to the left or right. Characters like “I,” “still,” and “up” all deliberately shift their center of gravity to one side; the internal structure is tight and slanted, while the outer contour remains roughly stable. When handled well, this approach gives a piece strong rhythm and movement.

The upside is that the characters are not stiff. In each line there are several spots that “jump,” so the eye cannot glide lazily over the surface. The cluster of characters that say “I am thinking” are especially vivid: their sizes vary, their postures differ, and the reading rhythm feels like spoken language. The piece has the flavor of a private letter.

The problem is that some of the tilts lack inner balance. They simply lean. The right-hand component of “wedding,” the top of “dish,” and the hooked vertical in “still” are typical. Their skeletons feel loose, as if blown awry by wind rather than turning by choice. Su and Mi’s writing is “dangerous but not unstable” because the strength of the bones and the support of the central area hold everything together. In this respect, the present work is not yet seasoned enough.

Writing Contemporary Speech between Su and Mi (在苏米之间写当代口语)

When it comes to inheritance and innovation, this piece makes its choices very clear.

The inheritance lies in technique and atmosphere. The brushwork moves between thick and thin, carrying both Su Shi’s weight and Mi Fu’s rounded turns. The lines of the text rise and fall rather than marching in tidy ranks. The paper is a slightly tinted, textured sheet with visible vertical rulings, recalling the feel of old letter paper. All of this shows a conscious traditional stance.

The innovation works on two levels. The first is content. The artist does not copy Tang or Song poems, nor the usual phrases like “tranquil yet far-seeing” or “all rivers run to the sea.” Instead, he writes a snatch of contemporary, joke-like dialogue. This line of northeastern country humor is solemnly brushed onto mock-antique paper, creating a strong contrast and making the viewer realize that calligraphy need not cling forever to classical texts. Modern spoken language can enter ink on paper, too, as long as it is written with flavor. For today’s many exhibition pieces that only copy old poems, this is a useful reminder.

The second is attitude. The work clearly does not aim for the orderliness and gravity of “exhibition style.” It deliberately keeps things casual and offhand. The characters are large, the lines loosely spaced; the whole piece feels like a letter taken down from a wall. This choice is itself a small, gentle rebellion against current “gallery standards.” Calligraphy can return to everyday life; it does not have to serve display boards forever.

In terms of standing out, the work does not yet amount to a fully mature personal style. But the direction is unmistakable: within the traditional frame of Su and Mi, it writes the language and mood of people today, refusing to lock itself into a path of endless stone-stele and model-book replication.

Taken as a whole, The “Second Uncle” Letter has several strong points.

First, its spirit is lively. The piece is never dull. The energy of the lines runs naturally downward. After reading the words, one cannot help but smile. This effect—“you walk away still repeating the line”—comes not just from the characters looking good, but from the truthfulness of the writing state and the truthfulness of the content, layered together.

Second, the lines have bone. Although some strokes float or drift, the overall strength of the brush is not like that of many “exhibition scripts,” which are only thick and heavy, without elasticity. Both beginnings and endings of strokes are mostly accounted for, and the turns show evidence of wrist power. There is none of the fake flying-white produced by mere shaking of the wrist.

Third, the sense of the letter form is strong. The artist clearly knows how letters are written. He dares to relax the spacing between characters and is not afraid of empty areas. This is very different from the many exhibition works that cover xuan paper with oversized characters, as if four characters must fill a whole square foot. It brings the piece closer to calligraphy’s original role as written communication.

The shortcomings are just as clear. First, the overall “orchestration” of the layout is not enough. The distribution of weight, density, straightness, and curve across the lines is not yet handled with full assurance. The problem of heavy right and light left makes the whole piece tilt slightly. For future works of this type, one could place a few heavier characters in the lower left, or adjust the position of the signature line, so the center of gravity does not always fall in the upper right.

Second, some characters are structurally loose. As already noted, “wedding,” “ritual,” “dish,” and “still” all show, to varying degrees, a center that drifts outward and internal support that is weak. If such writing is left unchecked over time, a whole body of work can slide toward soft, brushy forms and lose the “bone supporting flesh” strength found in Su’s and Mi’s letters.

Third, the element of display in the brushwork is a bit too strong. A few flipped and flicked strokes reveal the writer showing off skill rather than serving the needs of the character. The old masters, of course, sometimes indulged in a flourish, but only on the foundation of very solid overall command. At the present stage, it would still be better to return often to basics: to write more straightforward horizontals, verticals, and simple strokes, and let every mark grow from the structure instead of from decorative impulse.

A Playful Letter, and a Serious Attempt (一封好玩的尺牍，也是一次认真尝试)

In today’s exhibitions, the most common running script has three obvious traits: big, thick, and full. Characters must be very large, strokes very heavy, and the paper as covered as possible, so that the piece can “grab the eye” in a large hall. To suit this visual demand, many people turn running script into “enlarged regular script,” or into a standardized template of semi-cursive. From afar such works are imposing; up close they are all habitual gestures, with little real presence as writing.

The “Second Uncle” Letter takes almost the opposite route. It pulls running script back into the form of the letter, and it brings written words back into everyday life. Hung in an exhibition, a piece like this may not seize every viewer in the first instant. But those who care about writing will stop, and look for a while.

This path offers several pointers for the current calligraphy scene. First, subject matter can be closer to life. Calligraphy does not have to cling to “big words” forever; everyday speech has its own force. What matters is that the writer genuinely feels something for the words, rather than using them as a gimmick. Here, the image of “Second Uncle” and the line “why aren’t they serving the food yet” clearly come from lived experience; the work is warm because of that.

Second, form can be looser. Letter-style running script does not seek to make every character stand perfectly straight. It seeks the continuity of overall tone. If a work can keep its structure tight within this looseness, it will be more durable to look at than exhibition pieces where every stroke strains for effect. The precondition, of course, is solid basic training.

Third, criticism needs to catch up. This type of work cannot be judged by the same checklist used in competition reviews: whether the strokes align, whether the dimensions are uniform. What matters is the fit between line energy, mood, wording, and the state of writing—not just the neatness of strokes or regularity of size. When Su and Mi’s shadows appear in a piece, critics must look closely to see whether it is mere imitation, or a personal choice on traditional ground.

The “Second Uncle” Letter is not a perfect work. But it is sincere, amusing, and rooted in tradition. It shows that the influence of Su Dongpo and Mi Fu does not have to live only in poems and essays steeped in antiquity. It can surface in a light, colloquial exchange. Running script does not have to live only on gallery walls; it can return to the countryside, to jokes and everyday talk.

From a professional standpoint, this piece still needs more work on layout and structure, and the brush should trade some flash for more composure. Yet it is precisely these imperfections that mark it as the work of a living hand rather than a pattern copied from a computer. If more pieces like this appear in the future, narrowing the distance between calligraphy and contemporary life and opening more conversation between the looseness of the letter and the discipline of the exhibition piece, then The “Second Uncle” Letter will count as a small brick worth remembering.

Ren Jingjing

Among the surviving letters of the Eastern Jin, few works, if any, resemble the “Letter on Rehmannia Decoction for My Wife” (《新妇地黄汤帖》) in the way it folds everyday trifles, a family illness, and the highest level of calligraphy into a small sheet of paper. The letter mentions only a few things: the young daughter-in-law has been taking a rehmannia decoction and her illness seems slightly better; her eating and sleeping are still poor, and the writer’s anxiety has not gone away; the matters his friends discussed earlier have probably already been settled; the man named Xie has still not come back, which is puzzling, so he has to write and ask. The content could not be more plain. There is not a single line of “dwelling on mountains and streams,” not a single trace of refined talk about wind and moon.

That is exactly why the letter is so moving. The family life of an Eastern Jin gentleman suddenly feels close at hand: sickness, herbal medicine, constant worry, asking around for news of a friend—these small rises and falls of feeling are all written into the ups and downs of the ink lines. The “Rehmannia Decoction Letter” (《地黄汤帖》) was not written for an exhibition, and not created as a work of art for posterity. It was, at the time, simply a real family letter. Only later, when Tang-dynasty copyists carefully traced it and mounted it into an album, did it become the “famous letter” that generations have copied and studied.

Between Running Script and Regular Script: From “New Daughter-in-law” to the Rhythm of the Whole Letter

Judging from the surviving rubbings and copies, scholars generally believe that the “Letter on Rehmannia Decoction for My New Daughter-in-law” was written in the eleventh year of the Taiyuan era, that is, 386 CE. At that time Wang Xianzhi (王献之) was just past forty. Both his official career and his health were entering their last phase. This letter is often regarded as one of his final representative works. The tone of the letter—“the illness has eased slightly, but the anxiety refuses to lift”—echoes the movement of the brush, which shifts from heavy to relaxed, and together they give the piece its unique atmosphere.

Who, exactly, is the “xinfu” (新妇) in the Letter on Rehmannia Decoction for My Wife (《新妇地黄汤帖》)? In the Eastern Jin and the periods around it, xinfu (新妇) simply means “daughter-in-law” or “young wife,” much like the everyday word xifu (媳妇). In modern Minxi Chinese (闽西语), people still say “to marry a xinfu” (娶新妇) when they mean “to take a wife.” The sources do not tell us which woman in Wang Xianzhi’s (王献之) household was taking rehmannia decoction, and there is no reliable external evidence that would allow us to match the term to a specific person. A few modern articles suggest that xinfu here refers to “Wang Xianzhi’s recently married wife,” but this is probably mistaken. When he wrote the Letter on Rehmannia Decoction for My Wife, Wang was already in his forties. Unless his first wife had died and he had newly remarried, there would be no “new” wife to speak of. The xin (新) in xinfu is not “new” in the sense of new versus old; xinfu is a set term, essentially equivalent to “Wife.”

Look at the first line. The two characters “new daughter-in-law” (新妇) are written with unusual steadiness. The structure is slightly flattened and square. The strokes are thick, and the starting and ending of each line are very careful, as if the writer still carries a trace of unease in his heart. In the phrases “has been taking rehmannia decoction” (服地黄汤来) and “seems to have lessened” (似减), the turns of the brush are a bit tight, the brush moves mainly on the central tip, and the strokes are round and full, yet not muddy or dragging.

When it comes to “her sleep and eating are still not good” (眠食尚未佳), the rhythm begins to change. The horizontal strokes and diagonal movements slowly lengthen. The linking strokes that carry over from one character to the next become natural. The flow of the lines runs on in a single breath, and the characters begin to answer one another. By the time the line “the worry will not leave my heart” (忧患不去心) appears, the writing has clearly entered the state in which Wang Xianzhi’s running script is at its best: the strokes push outward, the lines are elastic, the rise and fall of pressure feels like breathing. The brushwork never flaunts its skill on purpose, yet it is never loose.

From the second line on, the “tight rein” of the whole letter almost disappears. At first glance, the reader sees nothing but rounded lines throughout and ink that varies naturally in light and dark. In terms of layout, the space between lines is not wide and the spacing between characters is a bit tight, but the page does not feel cramped, because each character’s center of gravity pulls slightly inward and then lets the nearby blank space “breathe.” The dots and short strokes are executed with precision; there is not a single sloppy stroke.

If this piece is set against many later works in the so-called “exhibition style,” a basic difference becomes clear. Here, the rhythm grows out of the writing itself; it is not laid on by design. At the beginning, as the text moves from illness to worry, the mood is still somewhat pressed down. When it reaches the friends’ business and Xie’s failure to return, the brush loosenes, bringing with it a sense of sighing and puzzlement. The advance of the verbal content pulls the brush along. From the first “new daughter-in-law” to the last phrase “to inquire in writing” (书问也), the whole letter joins into a single wave of feeling. This is one of the most captivating aspects of letter-style calligraphy.

The well-known pieces left by Wang Xianzhi are mostly also letters and short notes, such as the “Mid-Autumn Letter” (《中秋帖》), the “Duck-Head Pill Letter” (《鸭头丸帖》), and the “Twenty-Ninth Day Letter” (《廿九日帖》). Compared with these works, the “Letter on Rehmannia Decoction for My New Daughter-in-law” has a few obvious features.

First, it has the strongest flavor of running-regular script. In pieces like the “Mid-Autumn Letter,” the writing already comes very close to running-cursive script. The brush moves in long chains, and parts of the structure even carry a clerical-cursive linkage, so that some characters can only be recognized by habit. The “Rehmannia Decoction Letter” is not like that. Although the flow of the lines is smooth, the structure of each character remains relatively complete. The basic frame of regular script still holds between the dots and strokes. The writing has the movement of running script but does not lose the rules of regular script. For this reason it is often regarded as a model for learning running-regular script.

Second, the brushwork is rounder, thicker, and more compact inside. In some letters with a stronger cursive flavor, Wang Xianzhi moves very fast. The lines are slightly thinner and more wiry, and they give an impression of lightness and agility. In the “Letter on Rehmannia Decoction for My New Daughter-in-law,” however, the hand is clearly “pulled back.” The lines are fuller. When the brush tip turns, it is often pressed inward; there are hardly any strokes that simply shoot straight out. Especially in vertical strokes and sweeping strokes, the force is full, while the turns remain soft yet firm. Compared with the lighter, brisk touch of his youth, this feeling carries more calm and restraint.

Third, the emotional color is more complex. In other letters, Wang Xianzhi often talks about seasons, meetings and partings, and banquets. The tone may be relaxed, or it may carry a slight sadness, but overall it is still the social world of the literati. The “Rehmannia Decoction Letter,” however, centers on illness in the household. Worry and fatigue come through between the lines. The brushwork moves from heavy to light, from tight to loose, exactly matching the psychological shift in the letter from “the illness seems slightly better but the worry will not lift” to “Xie has not yet returned.” In terms of emotional layers, this work has more depth than many famous letters.

From Wang Xizhi to Wang Xianzhi: Inheritance and Divergence

Any discussion of Wang Xianzhi has to come back to Wang Xizhi (王羲之). The “Rehmannia Decoction Letter” is no exception. When it is placed next to pieces like the “Preface to the Orchid Pavilion” (《兰亭序》), the “Letter on Disorder and War” (《丧乱帖》), or the “Cold Spell Letter” (《寒切帖》), the father-and-son relationship shows both clear inheritance and clear divergence.

The inheritance appears first in the brushwork. The basic training of the Two Wangs is the same. They favor the central tip of the brush and stress “pressing inward” as they move. Their lines are round rather than sharply angled, and changes in thickness pass naturally from one to another. Because of this way of writing with the center of the brush, their characters, though sometimes fine and slender, never feel empty or weak. Many of the vertical and slanting strokes in the “Rehmannia Decoction Letter” still echo the “Orchid Pavilion” style, only more compressed, with slightly thinner lines and quicker turns.

But the differences are just as obvious. Wang Xizhi’s mature works usually put great weight on the overall layout. The spacing between lines is open, the characters tend to be broad, and their posture is gracious. The impression is one of “balance” and “moderation.” Even when he writes to friends and relatives, his running-regular script often carries a sense of ceremony. Wang Xianzhi is more shaped by his personal temperament. His characters are often a bit narrow and tall, with the center of gravity lifted upward. Many of the horizontal strokes tilt slightly. As a whole, the writing feels lighter, more lively, and more like “side-tip dancing in the air.” The “Letter on Rehmannia Decoction for My New Daughter-in-law,” though relatively restrained, is still obviously more compact and more “inward and urgent” than his father’s work.

In historical appraisal, from the Eastern Jin to the early Tang—nearly three hundred years—Wang Xianzhi’s reputation was not lower than his father’s, and at times even surpassed that of Wang Xizhi. The calligraphic tradition of the Southern Dynasties often treated the “Younger Wang” as the primary model, especially praising his spirit of innovation and his courage to “break the forms.” Only later, when Emperor Taizong of Tang became obsessed with the “Preface to the Orchid Pavilion” and collected Wang Xizhi’s works on a huge scale, did opinion slowly tilt toward “honoring the Elder Wang above all.” In a sense, the “Rehmannia Decoction Letter” stands right at this turning point. It clearly inherits the refined brushwork of the Wang family line, yet it also shows Wang Xianzhi’s own more delicate and quick-moving side.

From the standpoint of technique, the strengths of the “Letter on Rehmannia Decoction for My New Daughter-in-law” are striking. The first strength is rhythm. The letter never chases after obvious oddity or risk. Instead, it finds ups and downs within evenness. Changes in thickness are small, but through shifts in weight and speed the writing creates a breathing rhythm. As readers follow the trace of the ink down the page, it is easy to feel an inner beat. For running-regular script, this is especially important.

The second strength is the roundness and outward push of the strokes. Wang Xianzhi’s running-regular script often has the feature of “pushing outward”: the brush tip presses out from the center just a little, making the lines full and resilient. This is not like some later calligraphers, who rely only on a thick brush to create a sense of heaviness. In the “Rehmannia Decoction Letter,” this outward push shows clearly in the verticals and dots, giving the work real strength inside its fine, slender appearance.

The third strength is the strict care for detail. Although the whole letter looks relaxed and natural, when each stroke is examined, it is hard to find anywhere the writer let the brush slide by carelessly. Lifting and pressing are clear. Every turn is accounted for. Most strokes end with a slight return of the brush, avoiding dead, sharp points. This is, one might say, a letter dashed off only after long and thorough training.

Of course, the piece is not without problems. Compared with Wang Xizhi, Wang Xianzhi’s running-regular script is generally finer and narrower, and the “Rehmannia Decoction Letter” also shows this tendency. For viewers used to the aesthetics of stone inscriptions, this “thin and long” look can easily register as “soft” and “not upright,” especially in the lower halves of some characters, which appear somewhat lean and lack a heavy base. In addition, the spacing between lines is tight. If the letter is copied and enlarged into a huge exhibition piece, it can easily look crowded and chaotic if the proportions are not adjusted. This is a common problem when modern writers simply blow up model letters without regard to scale.

In terms of content and mood, the “Rehmannia Decoction Letter” is not about “carefree ease.” It leans toward restraint and anxiety. This atmosphere is compelling, but it also casts a shadow over the whole work. Compared with the transparent simplicity of the “Mid-Autumn Letter,” it gives up some airy lightness and gains a heavier sense of everyday life. There is no simple ranking between the two. They appeal to different kinds of taste.

From One Family Letter by Wang Xianzhi to Today’s “Exhibition Style”

The “Letter on Rehmannia Decoction for My New Daughter-in-law” is, at its core, an everyday letter. There is no title inscription, no grand final signature, and no sign that the writer meant to leave a “famous letter” for later generations. Precisely for that reason, it is especially suited for comparison with today’s trend of “exhibition style.”

Many running-script works shown in today’s exhibitions share a few common traits: the paper is huge, the characters are exaggerated, the strokes are thick, and the layout aims for visual impact. There is heavy use of flying white and sharp contrasts of ink. Walk once around such a show and the force is impressive. Look more closely, though, and problems appear everywhere: unbalanced structure, unstable use of the central brush tip, awkward linking strokes, and at times even confusion about the basic order of strokes. At the root of these issues is a shift in how writing is made. The rhythm of the brush no longer follows the natural unfolding of language. It circles instead around “effect.”

Against this background, the lessons of the “Rehmannia Decoction Letter” are simple. First, letter writing puts content first. The writer is thinking about “what needs to be told to the other person.” The weight and speed of the brush naturally follow the emotion, which is much more natural than starting from the thought “I want to make a grand piece with overwhelming force.”

Second, the size of a letter suits the movement of the hand. The paper is not large and the number of lines is limited. The rise and fall of the wrist and the turns of the fingers all occur within a comfortable range. The lines that remain on the paper therefore have a sense of “just right.” Today’s works on enormous scrolls, if they do not rest on matching physical training and are only blown-up copies of model letters, can hardly reproduce this feeling of “just right.”

Third, a letter shows the writer’s “real temper” most easily. In formal works, a calligrapher can tidy up the pose and polish again and again. In a quickly written family letter, it is hard to keep the posture up all the time. In the “Rehmannia Decoction Letter,” Wang Xianzhi writes under the pressure of illness at home. Many details show the rise and fall of his mood. These imperfect places are exactly what make the work feel real. For writers today, the question is how to preserve this reality in pieces made for exhibition, instead of chasing only what looks “good” or “impressive.”

Finally, letter-style calligraphy reminds people that writing Chinese characters was, to begin with, a daily act, not a pure “stage performance.” Wang Xianzhi and Wang Xizhi are honored by later ages as “sages of calligraphy” not because they created a huge number of special “works for display,” but because in daily letters, scripture copying, and inscriptions they pushed a stable and elegant way of writing to its highest point. The “Letter on Rehmannia Decoction for My New Daughter-in-law” offers a clear example: even in the most ordinary communicative setting, running-regular script can still be this precise, this rhythmic, and this full of feeling.

The reason the “Letter on Rehmannia Decoction for My New Daughter-in-law” holds an important place in the tradition of copying is not only that it is “said to be Wang Xianzhi’s final work.” More importantly, it condenses the living scene of Eastern Jin literati, the emotions of a family, and the cultivation of brush and ink into a single sheet of paper.

From the viewpoint of calligraphy history, it shows the maturity of Wang Xianzhi’s later years. On top of the style of the Two Wangs, which had already reached a high level in his father’s generation, he writes running-regular script in a way that is tighter, more rhythmic, and more charged with personal feeling. Compared with his own other famous letters, it is more restrained and heavier in emotion. Its strengths and weaknesses are both very clear, and it feels all the more genuine for that.

For writers today, this letter at least sets out a few simple but hard-to-reach demands: write characters for real recipients, not for judges; let the rhythm of the strokes follow the language and the mood, not the lights of the exhibition hall; within a limited sheet, bring basic technique as close to perfection as possible, instead of relying on scale to create force. If one can learn even a small part of this from Wang Xianzhi, the “Letter on Rehmannia Decoction for My New Daughter-in-law” will not remain only an antique to look at. It will still be speaking on the spot, like a teacher.