Page 207 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

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126 Running script, hsing-sku. Quo
Mcng-fu (1254-1322). part of his Pjo-j'i
the prc-Ch'in period have been found, but the style is more famil- Spring Potm. Hindscroll. Ink on piper.
iar on rubbings taken from stone inscriptions of the Han Dynasty Yuan Dynwty-
which display its potential for monumental form at its best.
Some Chinese characters have as many as twenty or more
strokes. According to tradition, it was the need for a script that
could be written quickly in the heat of battle that gave birth to the
highly cursive "draft script" (ts'ao-shu). In fact, some such abbre-
viated script must have been in existence for some time for practi-
cal and commercial uses, but in the Han it developed into an art
form in its own right. Indeed, in the turbulent post-Han period it
became, in company with the intellectual Taoism fashionable at
the time, something of a cult among the literati. Meantime, the
rather formal and angular Han li-shu was evolving naturally into
the more flowing and harmonious "regular script" (k'ai-shu, or
cheng-shu), which has, with its variants, remained the standard
form, learned by every child, up to the present day.
Every later style of script has its own hsing ("running") variety.
The southern calligraphcr Wang Hsi-chih (303-379) and his sons
developed a supple k'ai-shu and a hsing-shtt, of which an example is
illustrated here. The somewhat "feminine" elegance of the south-
ern style is often contrasted with the more "masculine" scripts of
the north, which continued to preserve some of the angular
strength of the old Han li-shu. Through the Six Dynasties the two
traditions, southern and northern, developed side-by-side. When
China was reunited under the Sui and T'ang some great calligra-
phers, notably Yen Chen-ch'ing, succeeded in reconciling the ar-
chaic power of the northern style with the elegant fluidity of the
southern.
By this time the main traditional schools were well established.
Beyond them lay the calligraphy of the individualists, Zen adepts.