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Author’s Note

Thousands of years ago, the Chinese started to develop a
written language. Instead of a few dozen letters, they
created thousands of characters, and each character was
derived from the image of the subject.

The art of Chinese calligraphy developed when the
Chinese created brush pens to write the characters with
ink. These written characters have evolved over the course
of China’s five-thousand-year history. A good illustration
of this transition can be seen in the change of the character
“fish,” as shown below.

Chinese calligraphy is an art form specific to the Chinese
written language. It contains three essential elements —
the stroke, the structure, and the spirit.

First: The Beauty of the Stroke
Chinese characters are formed by assembling strokes with
a variety of shapes. Using flexible brush pen and ink — the
tools of Chinese calligraphy — allows the strokes to be
thick or thin, dry or wet, heavy or light, rigid or soft. The
various forms of the strokes can be used to express
different emotions.
Second: The Beauty of the Structure
Unlike phonetic languages that are based on simple
alphabet letters, each Chinese character is composed of
multiple parts. The artist’s choice of how to position these
parts within a character is like an architect designing a
building. A good calligrapher will seek symmetry and
harmony and use the white blank space to create a
balanced structure.

Third: The Beauty of the Spirit
To appreciate this art form, we have to look beyond the
individual strokes and characters and focus on the
complete image. The “breath” of the whole image — the
flow from one stroke to the next, the connection of one character to another, enable the calligrapher to make the whole page
come to life. The way the characters relate to each other reveals the calligrapher’s emotions to the viewer.

Chinese calligraphy is graceful and expressive, as poetic as a poem, as rhythmic as dancing, and as melodious as music.
Picasso once said that if he had started his life as an artist with the knowledge of Chinese calligraphy, he would have been a
calligrapher rather than a painter.

Eighteen Vats of Water was inspired by the stories of Wang Xianzhi and his father Wang Xizhi, the distinguished examples of
great calligraphers. Although they lived almost two thousand years ago in the fourth century, they are remembered today as
the “Two Wangs,” and their beautiful work continues to be displayed, admired, and studied in all of China.