While studying Chinese calligraphy in college I discovered something counterintuitive: simple characters were harder to write than complicated ones. There are two main reasons for this. First, when there are only a few strokes to look at, the shape of each stroke carries more weight. Second, every character lives in a square of whitespace. If a character is simple, it is harder to position it well inside that square.

But this quality only really applies to forms of calligraphy that appeared relatively late in the evolution of Chinese script. Chinese calligraphy wasn’t always full of interesting stroke shapes and challenging whitespace, and the story of how Chinese calligraphy evolved those qualities is fascinating in its own right and can also give us insight into the world of Chinese painting. Before we jump into the story of calligraphy, take a moment to appreciate the unique style of Chinese painting as in the example below:

Seal Script

The first kind of Chinese calligraphy that was standardized has come to be called “seal script” and was used roughly between 1000 BC and 200 BC. Seal script characters are rendered with simple lines, straight or curved, with even thickness and rounded ends, perfectly placed within a vertically elongated rectangle. Here is the character for “ten” in this style:

Characters in seal script are rendered with geometric precision, and there isn’t a lot of room for artists to express themselves. Of course, at that time in Chinese history, personal expression wasn’t the point of calligraphy. Calligraphers in that era were a small class of official scholars, shamans, and philosophers who wrote characters as a service to the king.

Clerical Script

Around 500 BC a transformation began to take place. The small kingdoms that proliferated at the end of the Zhou dynasty started to be annexed by larger kingdoms. Large kingdoms meant more government structures, and in the process of bureaucratization governments started delegating the work of record keeping and reporting to lesser scribes, military men, or slaves. As a result, the meticulous forms of seal script, once the pride of the scholar class, degraded into a more informal style called “clerical script” that was simpler and easier to write. This script gained dominance during the Qin dynasty because the emperor placed an almost total ban on scholars serving in government.

After the Qin dynasty fell, the Han dynasty became its successor, and professional scholars were welcomed back into the government. When scholars took back the work of writing they didn’t reject clerical script in favor of seal script. The new scholar class embraced clerical script, and the qualities of that script that were born of lazy or careless writing were standardized and refined.

Below are three examples of the character for ten in clerical script. Notice that stroke width, length, and shape are starting to vary, introducing a feeling of expressiveness to the character. Han dynasty writings extolling the beauty of clerical script stroke shapes suggest that this new style appealed to the aesthetic sense of calligraphers and artists.

Regular Script

The next change happened during the period between 200CE and 500CE. A new script slowly gained acceptance and replaced clerical script. It was a combination of clerical script combined with elements of cursive writing, and was to become the final standard for Chinese regular (i.e. non-cursive) script. At the same time a semi-cursive script was also developed which was a more free-form version of regular script with some joined strokes. Here are three examples of the character for “ten” from regular script:

First notice the variety of shapes in each individual stroke. The overall structure of the strokes is more or less the same (the exception being the pointed bottom of the vertical stroke in the first character), but the details of stroke width, the sharpness of the angles, and the curvature of the rounded parts is different in each example.

There is also a slight variation in the position of the character inside the square where it sits. In the examples of clerical script above, despite the variation in the strokes, all three characters have a vertical stroke rooted in the center of the square with a horizontal stroke neatly crossing near the top. In regular script we see that the whole character is leaning slightly to the right, and that this rightward lean is balanced by the left side of the horizontal stroke.

Dynamic Balance

These variations are used by each calligrapher differently to create a feeling of dynamic balance. If you understand this point you’ve grasped a large part of the aesthetic of Chinese calligraphy. To drive home this point look at the character for “center” in regular script, and notice again the variety of stroke shapes and size as well as the balance of the entire character. Think about how these qualities can convey tone similar to the way that tone of voice does.

These three characters use geometry, balance, and negative space to convey three completely distinct feelings. Finally, here is an extreme example: two examples of calligraphy by two famous calligraphers with radically different styles, one of them an emperor and the other a poet. See if you can tell which one is which:





The top piece is by Emperor Huizong of the Song dynasty, and the bottom piece is by Hunag Tingjian who also lived during the Song dynasty.

The Systematization of Expressive Freedom

In both the transition from seal script to clerical script, and from clerical script to regular script, a new script was born out of the systematization and standardization of cursive elements. In regular script a tension between standardization and expressiveness was achieved that created a quality of dynamic balance, turning each character into a composition with weight and movement. With every character the calligrapher must balance the positive and negative space as well the various components of the character. Take a look at an example of the three styles side-by-side so that you can see this evolution for yourself, and notice how the third style almost looks three dimensional in comparison to the first two.

As you can see, there was an extremely well developed sense of abstract balance and composition in Chinese calligraphy that developed at an early time in history. You could say that the Chinese aesthetic was rooted in and grew out of a philosophy of abstract representation through the balance of positive and negative, black ink on white paper. Now lets see if we can find the influence of that philosophy in Chinese landscape painting.

Chinese Painting

The painting below is quite early (1080 ad) but a minimal style with abundant negative space is already apparent. There is a single focal point in the center of the left-hand side, and the rest of the landscape spreads to the right in a v-shaped pattern. The top right is very faint and fans out to create a feeling of depth. The overall feeling, however, is not one of incompleteness. The emptiness stimulates the imagination, and the elements of the painting are balanced so that nothing feels missing even though much is left out.



Fast forward about three hundred years and this aesthetic has blossomed into a new style where the influence of calligraphy is more prominent. The painter uses stark black strokes on white paper and the subject is stylized to a high level of abstraction. In the painting below, notice the role of the poem on the far left in balancing the weight of the trees and boulders on the right. Between these two main actors, a few strands of mountains serve to create the illusion of distance. About half of the canvas is completely blank and yet the composition gives a feeling of fullness purely on account of the expressiveness of the trees and the balance of the composition. The artist’s seal typically adds an additional element of contrast and balance, but unfortunately on older paintings that aspect has been destroyed by the presence of collector’s seals that were added later on.



Many artists who were not professional painters favored this minimal, abstract approach because it made painting more accessible to calligraphers. The simplicity and stylization of the subject matter was expressive in much the same way that calligraphy was expressive: through the balance of composition and use of subtle brushwork to convey feeling. This style came to be known as “写意” which means “to write the meaning,” and can be considered an entirely different branch of art when compared to western landscape painting. Where western landscape painting aims to faithfully reproduce the appearance of a scene on the canvas, this style of Chinese painting uses abstraction to convey feelings and ideas that the scene evokes in the mind of the painter.

In the early Qing dynasty the style of the amateur “scholar painters” was compiled into a manual that served as a standard for calligraphers who wanted to venture into painting. This manual, the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, demonstrates the same trend towards standardization similar to what we see in the history of calligraphy.

This branch of Chinese painting was clearly influenced by the aesthetic principles of Chinese calligraphy, but there are other, slightly more nebulous factors that also played a part. Chinese philosophy, for example, is abundant with discussions of yin and yang, emptiness and fullness. The balance of black shapes on white space is suggestive of the balance of energy described in Chinese cosmology. The style of Chinese poetry also had an influence on the aesthetic of Chinese painting. Chinese poems often use just a few characters to convey a scene of great depth, leaving most of the scene unspoken. By condensing their compositions to just a few elements full of negative space and by explicitly pairing their compositions with poems, the scholar painters achieved a style that cleverly merged the aesthetics and philosophy of calligraphy, poetry, and landscape.

The fact that poetry and calligraphy were closely associated with government service and the upper class meant that, for thousands of years, educated people devoted their leisure time to the practice of aesthetics and literature, and exploring the relationship between art and nature. If we understand the peculiar history of Chinese art and the culture of the people who practiced it we can more fully appreciate its beauty: