Calligraphy occupies a special place in traditional Chinese culture and art, so it is not surprising that it is still an incomplete treasure trove of discoveries for scientists and researchers.
In March, 5th, doc. Loreta Poškaitė used to present the history of Chinese calligraphy at our institute before. But his time in the lecture we looked into the 20th century. The peculiarities of Chinese calligraphy, we tried to see the characteristics of different directions of modern calligraphy, we admired the masterpieces of avant-garde art.
Calligraphy, according to the lecturer, has long been a practice of the Chinese elite in China. Even today, in modern times, calligraphy is an exclusively occupation of government and high society. The West, due to its inability to read calligraphically written text, did not understand Chinese calligraphy for a long time and only began to evaluate it by comparing calligraphy with abstract art. But that relationship between calligraphy and abstract art was ambiguous. After all, the purpose of calligraphy is to convey a text. In calligraphy, on the other hand, the identity of the text is underestimated and transformed into a sign of visual meaning. So, in this lecture, we tried to explain whether calligraphy can be equated with abstract art.
Here we also learned about the twentieth century when the trends of modern calligraphy emerged. The first trend, classical calligraphy, which sought to preserve old traditions. The second was neoclassical calligraphy, which was a continuation of the first aspirations. XX a. Modernist pictorial calligraphy emerged in the 1990s. The first exhibition of such works was held in 1985. From 1988 onwards, a fourth direction began to develop - avant-garde calligraphy, which not only did not eliminate hieroglyphs, but, on the contrary, their deconstruction gave the characters a new form. Artists such as Xu Bing 徐冰 and Gu Wenda 谷 文 达, have discovered a new connection between calligraphy as a system of semantic meanings and the image itself.
Thus, calligraphy in China lives for more than 20 centuries, and has maintained the continuity of classical aesthetic canons, and over the centuries has acquired new shades, which became particularly revealed in the twentieth century.
We are glad to have such a big audience and look forward to see you in our next lectures.