The Aesthetic Characteristics Of Chinese Crazy Grass Art

In Chinese calligraphy,Caoshu,a sort of cursive writing,has achieved a perfect combination of utility and sentiment.Sun Guoting,an artist of the Dang Dynasty,complimented Caoshu as "originating from the nature of the universe and expressing the connotation of literary excellence".The wild cursive,being the zenith of the cursive art,has expressed meanings and emotions to the extreme.The evolution of styles in Chinese calligraphy has experienced several phases,ranging from oracle bone script,seal script,official script,running script to cursive script and semi-cursive script.Although the script changed its outline as the turning stroke was transformed from round shape to square during "Li Bian"(the evolution from seal script to official script),the four earlier scripts(the oracle bone script,the seal script,the official script and the regular script)are all embodied with a graceful style characteristic of stable structures and well-distributed strokes throughout their development.While the cursive script,especially the wild cursive,basically abandons the path of form imitation which utilizes strokes or components(radicals).Instead,it regards the lyricism a main purport and strives to render the character patterns more pictographic and components more self-explanatory(more symbolic).With diverse outlines and shapes of individual characters and seemingly close interaction among them,the art of composition in Chinese calligraphy takes shape vigorously and finally the magnificent style emerges.The wild cursive marks a watershed in the field of Chinese calligraphy with its fiery passion and enchanting character patterns.Eventually,the cursive script has evolved into an independent aesthetic art after becoming gradually aloof from daily use.The thesis illustrates the origin and key points of cursive writing art,explores the incentive of its development and then analyzes how public morals as well as styles of poetry,paintings,music and calligraphy influence and interact with the maturity of wild cursive writing.in the Dang Dynasty,a flourishing age in Chinese history.This article aims at interpreting the writing characteristics and the unique aesthetic state of the wild cursive by the examples of two famous calligraphers in Chinese history:Zhang Xu and Huai Su.Together referred to as "the crazy Zhang and the drunk Su",the two of them manage to integrate innovation into conventional rules of composition,thus obtaining great results beyond expectation.Both featured with a sense of madness,however,the distinction between their specific styles can be clearly seen.Just like the tiger and the lion,they differ in appearances tremendously even though they both belong to savage beasts.Zhang Xu shows the extreme of "juan" with integrity in unrestraint,while Huai Su is typical of"Kuang" with sophistication in it.Represented by them,the wild cursive writing with profound aesthetic prospect and mad forms has at least four features:the beauty of painting with mixture of feints and ambushes;the galloping beauty of dancing;the beauty of music with melodious modulation in tone and the indulgent beauty of drawing lines.Based on analyzing the classics of the above two great masters,this thesis makes an attempt to clarify that the structure,artistic conception and style of wild cursive bear a complex relationship with the characters,skills and mental state of calligraphers.It also associates the beauty of wild cursive with that of poetry,painting,music and dancing to draw a comparison between them,aiming at interpreting the aesthetic significance of wild cursive from multiple angles and striving to inspire the contemporary calligraphers in China.