This post was written for the Design China blog, which you can see here.
On the 6th
May, The British Museum welcomed the world-renowned calligrapher Professor Wang
Dongling for his first public performance in London for this year’s London
Craft Week. Taking centre stage in the Great Court, four rolls of paper were
laid and taped onto the marble floor at the entrance of the museum, where a
crowd gathered in wait of a performance by ‘China’s greatest living
calligrapher’.
Wang took a slender brush in his
hand, a sixty-centimetre-long bamboo handle with a short drop of hair, and
dipped it into a red bucket. He wore an all-black outfit with bright red socks,
matching the bucket of ink. Beginning in the top right hand corner, Wang starts
to paint; he holds the brush but the very end of the handle, his body in a
constantly hunched position, knees slightly bent. After a few characters,
written vertically on the page, Wang walked back up towards the bucket to
re-ink his brush. The pace is efficient, confident, perhaps less sentimental
and more calculated than I imagined the process to look like. The ‘mad cursive’
script is difficult to decipher – the characters become abstract lines and
gestures, pulling out the traces of the body from the painting.
We were lucky to witness such a
large piece. In contrast to his wild, heavy works with enormous brushes,
finished in one swooping round of black, this piece felt bird-like, fluttering
and dainty with its small characters on a vast page. This piece took time. A meditative
hour was created in the hot and noisy atrium, with Wang solely concentrated on
the calligraphy as we looked on in awe. He didn’t even stop for water. The
lines fade in and out of focus as the ink dries on the brush, forming an
undulating surface from the paper. The occasional swift flick of the brush for
elongated characters surprised the audience, bringing his movement back into
focus.
