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“Living by Selling Texts Instead of Farming – Qi Baishi’s Calligraphic Implication II”

  • show time：2018-04-15 to 2018-05-31
  • Organizer： Museum of Liaoning province, Museum of Hu’nan province Capital Museum, Museum of Chongqin Sanxia, Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum, and Beijing Academy of Fine Arts
  • venue：Beijing Fine Art Academy
    Beijing Academy of Fine Arts will be hosting the grand opening of “Living by Selling Texts Instead of Farming – Qi Baishi’s Calligraphic Implication II” on December 22nd, 2017. The exhibition is an initiative jointly sponsored by Museum of Liaoning province, Museum of Hu’nan province Capital Museum, Museum of Chongqin Sanxia, Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum, and Beijing Academy of Fine Arts. Aiming at tracing Qi Baishi’s development of style, the exhibition brings together over sixty Qi Baishi’s artworks from the collection of six nationwide institutes. It provides the viewers with an opportunity to get to know Qi Baishi’s calligraphies and appreciate the visual effects.
 
    In Qi Baishi’s early artistic career life, he started with “Guange style.” It was when Qi formally entered Master Hu Qinyuan’s home gate that Qi was influenced and started to make studies of the calligraphies of He Shaoji, a Qing dynasty calligrapher from Hu’nan province. With the broadened eye-horizon after traveling and the alteration of style during Qi’s late career life, Qi Baishi gradually worked from Jin Nong’s standard style of handwriting (“Kai Shu”), to Li Beihai’s running style of handwriting (“Xingshu”), to the style of seal characters on stone tablets of Han Dynasty, as well as the calligraphies of the masters of “Shanghai school.” Qi drew from what he studied and opened an artistic pathway that “Derived from old masters’ style at first, and departed from the old masters’ style,” which enabled him to develop his distinctive and individualized style of calligraphy. 
 
    Most of Qi Baishi’s calligraphies were in running style of handwriting (“Xingshu”) and the style of seal characters. The calligraphies in the running style of handwriting (“Xingshu”) are usually applied in the prefaces of paintings, in the titles for other’s books, and in daily life writings. Qi’s running style of handwriting (“Xingshu”) is bold and unrestrained, and the brushstrokes are full of variations. This is associated with Qi’s large-scale literati paintings.
 
    The calligraphies in the style of seal characters are generally applied in writing couplets, central scrolls, horizontal scrolls, as well as in art forms that associated with traditional seal cutting. The overall style is vigorous and forceful, and it developed to be bolder with freedom in Qi’s late years. The viewers can’t resist to be moved by Qi’s calligraphies. This exhibition not only presents the selective works from the collection of Beijing Academy of Fine Arts, also shows the highlighted works of art from the collection of Liaoning Museum and Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum. There are calligraphy works in varies styles of handwriting, including the running style of handwriting, the standard style of handwriting, the style of seal characters, and so on. The content of writings are also associated with contemporary society. For example, “Coming from the Crowds and Going into the Crowds” from the collection of Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum was a piece of writing that was done at Qi Baishi’s age of ninety, as a celebration of the foundation of Central Academy of Fine Arts. With carefully observation over the alteration of Qi’s writing style, we could get an insight that Qi Baishi kept on making studies of calligraphies even in his late years in hope of seeking new developments in writing style.

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