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Beyond the Appealing Ink works: The Calligraphy Works by He Shaoji and the School of Hunan

show time：2017-11-24 to 2018-01-25
Organizer：Hunan Museum, National Library, Liaoning Museum, Capital Museum, Chongqing Sanxia Museum, Jiaosu Museum, and Beijing Academy of Fine Arts
venue：Beijing Fine Art Academy

“Beyond the Appealing Ink Works” is a line extracted from He Shaoji’s poetry in praising the works of his predecessor Yan Zhenqing. It is fascinating that during He’s lifetime as well as after his death, there were countless of followers of He Shaoji. He’s late family had also left great artworks in the history of Chinese calligraphy. Beijing Academy of Fine Arts will be hosting the grand opening of “Beyond the Appealing Ink works: The Calligraphy Works by He Shaoji and the School of Hunan” on November 24th, 2017. The exhibition mainly focuses on the significance and influence of He Shaoji in the School of Hunan.

This exhibition had been selected to be a project in “National Art Museum Youth Curator Supporting Program in 2017. ”It brings together important collections from Hunan Museum, National Library, Liaoning Museum, Capital Museum, Chongqing Sanxia Museum, Jiaosu Museum, and Beijing Academy of Fine Arts. It exhibits calligraphy, painting, ancient books, ancient seals, poetry books, diaries and so on. The exhibition is divided into four sections: “Integrated Discipline,” “Learning from Predecessors,” “Developing an Individualistic Style,” “The Influence in Huanan.” This exhibition will lead the visitors to enter the world of calligraphy, and it provides an extraordinary opportunity to appreciate the loose yet energetic style of calligraphy, get to know the evolvement and development of calligraphy after He Shaoji. It is noteworthy that on December 22nd, 2017, Beijing Academy of Fine Arts will also be holding the exhibition of Qi Baishi’s calligraphy. By then, the two great masters of Hunan will be presented side-by-side. While this exhibition shows the influence of He Shaoji and the later development of calligraphy in Hunan, the other exhibition will show the individualistic calligraphy style by Qi Baishi and trace back to the origin of his style development. The two exhibitions will enable visitors to explore the relationship between the two masters and Hunan culture. They will be on display until January 21st, 2018.

He Shaoji lived in the time period when it is popular to make studies of the calligraphy works on stone tablets, including Jin style of writing from Shang and Zhou dynasty, Stone-carving of Qin and Han dynasty, epigraph of Six dynasties, Stone tablets of Tang dynasty. In he wave of making studies of stone tablets, He Shaoji was wise to integrate from multiple styles and take the advantageous features from each style, and develop his own individualistic style out of what he had learned. Under the influence of stone tablets, He formed a style that was as energetic as the characters on stone tablets, and at the same time, his style also integrated the loose style of South calligraphy style. In order to explain the origin of He Shaoji’s calligraphy style, the exhibition presents his studies of Huashan Tablet in official script style, Daoyin Tablet in standard script style, Zhuangzhou Stone Hut Tablet in running style of writing, as well as the list of his self-catalogued studies of stone tablets. They are significant for understanding how He formed his own individualistic style. In addition, the exhibition also displays his writing of Diary of Planting Bamboo (“Zhong Zhu Ri ji”) during Daoguang period, his writing of remarks when he taught in Changsha in his sixties, and his writings of leisure time. The exhibition certainly also includes his individualistic form of style when he worked on standard style of writing (“Kaishu”), running style of writing (“Xingshu”), official script of writing (“Lishu”), and the style of seal characters (“Zhuanshu”).