The Conflict Between Kang Youwei's Calligraphy Ideas And Practice

No doubt, Kang Youwei is a very important person in Chinese modern and contemporary history. His sole achievement as the leader of the Reform Movement of 1898 and the leader of Bourgeoisie Movement of Reform can keep his position in history. However, Kang Youwei also made great achievements as an educationist, calligrapher, calligraphy theorist, thinker, collector and connoisseur, and poetry. He put much energy into calligraphy, left behind a large amount of calligraphy works, and possessed his own unique features. His famous book Guang Yi Zhou Shuang Ji summarizes the theory and practice of Tablet Calligraphy, leads tablet calligraphy to be a systematic and practical school, leaves glorious footmarks in Chinese calligraphy history, and influences the calligraphy style for generations. However, calligraphy thought holds that calligraphy should move towards the direction of power, pungency, new atmosphere and persistence, inputting the new thoughts of political reform into calligraphy and leading the fading Tiexue in Late Qing Dynasty out of the embarrassing fragile situation. On the contrary, his own calligraphy practice can't escape away from the influence of copying the Shutie since childhood due to complicated reasons. Therefore, there exists a complicated conflict between his calligraphy thoughts and calligraphy practices. The innovation point of this thesis is the attempt to comb and analyze the deep reasons that cause the complicated conflict between his thoughts and artistic practices.Four parts constitute this thesis. Chapter 1 presents a brief review about the calligraphy situation in Qing Dynasty. At that time, Tiexue was declining, Taige Style was tending to be plain, and the calligraphy of Painter School went to be weird and absurd. These three calligraphy roads all faded, and the rise of epigraphic study and tablet calligraphy was an inevitability of history. Chapter 2 performed a systematic analysis of the relationship between Kang Youwei's reform thought and calligraphy thought. Kang Youwei first is a statesman. Whatever he did is to serve his political dream of saving the country and safeguarding the country. Kang Youwei took advantage of calligraphy and used it as the precedent theory of Reform Movement. He hoped to get the ways to benefit the society and build the nation power from the research on calligraphy theories. Hence, Kang Youwei's tablet calligraphy theory is closely and complicatedly related to reform thoughts. Chapter 3 is where the emphasis, the difficulty and the innovation lie. It discusses such artistic practices as the differences among his calligraphy works at different times, the differences between different creation forms, the changes of the typefaces for different purposes, and analyzes the conflict between his calligraphy thoughts and artistic practices from the perspectives of Bei and Tie, following Tang Style and admiring Han and Wei, as well as large script and small script, and finally reveals the deep reasons that cause the conflict. Chapter 4 talks about the inheritance and development of Kang Youwei's conflict literary view by the students of Kang School. Xiao Xian, Liang Qichao, Xu Beihong and Liu Haisu are all excellent transmitters of Kang Youwei's calligraphy art. Starting from different perspectives of Kang Youwei's conflict of calligraphy thought and artistic practices, they combine their own understandings of calligraphy, develop and enrich Kang Youwei's calligraphy style.