The insistence on the primacy of man over nature is considered to be the primary source of many of today's environmental problems.

According to ecofeminism, man's sense of authority over nature is the same as his sense of authority over women, both of which are destructive. The relationship between gender issues and environmental issues has also attracted the attention of artists since the 1970s.

"Life on Earth: Art and Ecofermism" is currently underway at The Brick Visual Arts space in Los Angeles, United States, sponsored by more than 70 institutions in Southern California, inviting 18 international artists or groups to bring their work to the exhibition, reflecting on the complex With the explosion of museums in the past two years, more and more young people have lined up to see the authentic calligraphy.

Copy the classics to expand the monument, the scribing practice has also become a new popular leisure activities. On the one hand, in our daily life, we rely heavily on the input method to communicate with electronic devices, and often forget to write; But on the other hand, whenever we are lucky enough to see the calligraphy of a famous artist, we will be shocked and moved instantly. This strange and familiar contradiction is our common feeling of calligraphy today.

Calligraphy is a unique form of artistic expression in Chinese culture. A piece of calligraphy is visually very simple, nothing more than some black lines on white paper; The meaning of a painting is very complex, we often say that the character is like the person. In ancient times, calligraphy was the most important means for literati to express themselves in a visual way.

It contains rhythm and rhythm in the static, which is the characteristic of calligraphy art. Through long-term muscle training, the calligrapher uses the elasticity of the brush, the intensity of ink, the degree of water absorption of paper or silk to create works in one go. The unique structure of Chinese characters, the rich changes of strokes, and the flowing and rhythmic strokes have aesthetic meaning.

There are many details about how the brush moves on paper. Esthetician Zong Baihua believes that the reason why Chinese calligraphy can develop into a special art lies in the pictographic Chinese characters and the writing tool is a brush made of animal hair. Lothar Ledderose, a German Sinologist and tenured professor in the Department of East Asian Art History at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Heidelberg, describes one of the most important characteristics of Chinese calligraphy: it is the only art form in which the creative process can be seen in the finished work. Unlike painting, which can be written arbitrarily, Chinese characters are written in a regular way. Calligraphy is the trace of continuous strokes of the brush in a specific order.

If you want to really understand a calligraphy work and understand its beauty more carefully and deeply, you still need some theoretical basis. One way to get started is to learn about the famous hands in history. Today I want to share with you the Northern Song Dynasty calligrapher Mi Fu.

Mi Fu was an accomplished calligrapher in the 11th century. Together with CAI Xiang, Su Shi and Huang Tingjian, he was called "the Four Families of Song Dynasty". As an intellectual elite at that time, Mi Fu also made outstanding contributions to the theoretical issue of the function and style of calligraphy.

Professor Peter Sturman from the University of California, United States, explored Mi Fu's calligraphy art within the framework of his ups and downs in life, and deeply investigated the culture of the Northern Song Dynasty in Mi Fu's time, as well as Mi Fu's role in promoting the theory of literati art, and wrote this book Mi Fu: Style and Chinese Calligraphy Art in the Northern Song Dynasty.

Mi Fu was not only an art connoisseur, but also an official with important responsibilities. He is not only an idle person who is devoted to mountains and rivers, but also a talented person who serves the emperor and is deeply influenced by Taoism. Mi Fu expressed his changing social and personal ideals under different social roles by exploring and developing his calligraphy style.

Shi's analysis takes into account the content and style of calligraphy works, placing Mi Fu's calligraphy firmly in the context of the historical development of the Northern Song Dynasty. At the same time, Shi Slow interprets "calligraphy", the most Chinese characteristic art form, by the relationship between Mi Fu and the art history of calligraphy after his life.

After the Northern Song Dynasty, dynasties came and went. Hundreds of years later, the famous calligrapher and painter Xu Wei made a brief evaluation of the works of the previous masters, including Mi Fu. Xu Wei praised the sublime temperament of Mi Fu's calligraphy, which he believed was unmatched by others, but he was puzzled by the dissonance in Mi Fu's calligraphy: Mi Shu was sometimes elegant and sometimes rough, while Huang Tingjian's style of calligraphy was relatively uniform.

Xu Wei's comments are not about artistic quality, but about style, which reflects how complicated it is to understand a style-conscious artist. Because artists generally follow a consistent creative path or an orderly development of style, the growth path of these artists is predictable; To understand an artist like Mi Fu, however, one must decipher a map made up of his personal decisions, the precise contours of which are largely unpredictable. This is the main reason why the dates of the creation of many of Mi Fu's extant works remain controversial to this day.

Mi Fu's calligraphy is characterized by diversity, which was particularly evident in the 1190s. During this period, Mi Fu constantly repaired, explored and adjusted, and his personal style alternately appeared and faded in the higher level structure. However, as Xu Wei said that the rice characters are "uneven", this diversity is also problematic, because the consciousness of the style and the so-called "ideas" are often opposed to the natural ideals in calligraphy.

"Will" represents subjective effort and shaping - but if one prefers "heart" to "hand", one loses the interest of innocence. Interestingly, when "meaning" dominates calligraphy, the result is likely to be a concern for nature. This kind of attention not only appeared in the late Northern Song Dynasty, but also occupied a dominant position in the contention of art theories from Ouyang Xiu to Su Shi and even later generations.

"Natural formation" gradually became Mi Fu's most concerned issue, even can be said to be a theme throughout his life. For example, his early obsession with the Jin Dynasty style of writing was largely due to his admiration for the natural frankness of the fourth century calligraphers. In addition, Mi Fu's free and extravagant writing style, which accompanied his difficult career, and his criticism of Zhang Xu's wild grass tradition, showed his pursuit of nature.

But it was not until some time after Cursive Nine Posts that Mi Fu's calligraphy matched the rhetoric of "nature". The "meaning" in Mi Fu's book is not so clear; His hands and pen became comfortable, or at least seemed so. This is an important change in Mi Fu's calligraphy, and he has a deeper understanding and evaluation of himself, which can be seen from his letter to an unnamed friend:

Since learning calligraphy, I have used about 100,000 pieces of paper, and now these works are scattered around the world. But as I got older, my handwriting got better. Whenever I see a work from my youth, I immediately try to replace the old calligraphy with something new. However, people usually don't allow me to do that. They don't realize that my work in old age is less beautiful and elegant, but natural. In my later years, my calligraphy is not so elegant and beautiful, and few people can appreciate its natural feeling, and people think that my recent books are not as good as those of my youth.

Mi Fu's so-called calligraphy in old age, and his personal circumstances highly related to the emergence of this style, will be the subject of the next chapter of the book. But here is an excellent example of a work whose mere glimpse of detail is enough to demonstrate the profound significance of this transformation.

This quick written short note "Zijin Research Post" is an example of the lack of posture and charm of calligraphy. The post pays little attention to the appropriateness of individual strokes and text, and in some places the strokes combine into indistinguishable ink, such as the character "zi". The text in the post is occasionally out of balance and out of shape.

The post not only looks sloppy, but also, compared with earlier works such as Zhang Jiming's Post from 20 years ago, especially seems to run counter to ordinary people's aesthetic. It is not difficult to understand that the natural state of Mi Fu's calligraphy is not suitable for everyone.

What caused this change in Mi Fu's calligraphy? To explore the concept behind this, we must start from Mi Fu's own works: the construction process of Mi Fu's calligraphy theoretical framework began from Lianshui, and then continued to develop and reach the peak, providing a corresponding critical model for evaluating Mi Fu's calligraphy in his later years.