INTRODUCTION: CALLIGRAPHY AS THE ‘SEED ART’ OF EAST ASIA

The high cultural status and centrality of calligraphy in the Japanese visual-art tradition, as in that of East Asia generally, is perhaps the most obvious of the defining features of that tradition. Although from a Western viewpoint it may also seem a unique feature, such is not actually the case: calligraphy is also central to much Islamic art, for instance, though for very different reasons and with quite different aesthetic results. Calligraphy is not the ‘seed art’ of Japan and East Asia because of any religious taboo against depicting the human image, but rather because of the high aesthetic and spiritual value attached to the calligraphic art itself. There are a number of historical and cultural reasons for this, which I can only briefly adumbrate here.

Most obvious is the sheer visual complexity of the Sino-Japanese writing system, which still retains something of its primordial ‘pictographic’ nature. The thousands of characters that comprise that system present a variety and complexity of form that no mere alphabet could even remotely match. In addition, there is a wide variety of styles in which the characters can be written, from the archaic pictographic style to the conventional ‘block’ style to the most minimalist cursive style. With this degree of visual richness inherent in the writing system itself, it is easy to see why it readily lent itself, from an early stage, to high aesthetic development as an ‘abstract’ art in visual terms (although, until quite recently, it never abandoned its ‘representational’ character in lexical terms).

A related and equally important factor is the close alliance between calligraphy and painting in China, Japan and other East Asian countries which adopted Chinese characters as part of their writing system. Because in China writing did not stray so far from its pictorial origins as in Western cultures that adopted alphabetical writing systems, the separation of the arts of drawing and painting from the art of writing never became as extreme as in the West (as indicated by the Japanese word kaku, which means both ‘to write’ and ‘to draw or paint’).