the Cultural Functions of Chinese Character Arts
A Brief Analysis of the Cultural Functions of Chinese Character Arts
Chinese characters, as the incarnation of the wisdom of Chinese people, has a long history, and profound artistic value and cultural influences. Since its appearance, it has been used as a written communication symbol, and developed altogether with the cultural process of the Han nationality. Having the distinct artistic charm, the Chinese characters not only performs a communication function, but works as a carrier of China’s splendid history and culture as well, which has promoted the inheritance and development of the traditional culture. Chinese characters is with beauty in “form, sound, and meaning”. This paper has discussed the influences of Chinese character arts on cultural transmission from the aesthetics perspective, and the positive effects of traditional culture on the formation and development of Chinese character arts.
1. Chinese character art in forms of calligraphy and seal cutting
Lu Xun once said that “Chinese characters has three beauties. The beauty in meaning touches one’s feelings; the beauty in sound pleases one’s ears; and the beauty in form delights the eyes” (Bai 29) Here the form beauty refers to the Chinese characters’ elegant font, based on which calligraphy and seal cutting arts become the treasure of Chinese culture and are endowed with profound artistic value and cultural influence. Even people who do not know Chinese in other countries can appreciate the charm of Chinese character calligraphy and seal cutting.
Chinese calligraphy art has a long history and goes back to ancient times. For thousands of years, there have been numerous calligraphers and voluminous works of calligraphy that leave priceless legacy for later generations. They have promoted the inheritance and development of the Chinese culture. Chinese calligraphy is called the “dancing on paper, silent music, and pictures of mind” (Fong 193) Through learning the calligraphy, people are exposed to the philosophy of life. There are a lot of sayings telling people how to be lenient and insightful, and to deal with problems in the right way, who will realize what is more important and what to choose in life. For instance, “Be a righteous man before learning calligraphy”; “Efforts should be put not only on the book”; “The overall structure of the characters should be contradictory but harmonious”; “Create a balanced visual structure by the extreme contrast of strokes”; “Verve comes first, and beautiful appearance comes next” (Lawrence 221). These sayings enable us to better understand the essence of Chinese traditional culture.
The calligraphy art has a profound internal connection with culture. Chinese characters is the symbol carrier of calligraphy and calligraphy is an aesthetic art of Chinese characters. The cultural value of traditional calligraphy in modern times has not disappeared. Instead, through cultural transformation and re-positioning, it has built up a solid foundation of modern culture for itself. In the tide of globalization, Cosmopolitanism has been expanded, and multicultural interaction comes onto the stage (Wang 89). In this cultural context of the new era, Chinese calligraphy, as a unique art in the Oriental cultures, it is destined to be a miracle in the world’s cultural history. Calligraphy is, as it were, a wonderful cultural and spiritual activity of the “Chinese characters culture circle”. Out of this circle, such as in Europe and the United States, there may also be handwriting, but they did not turn it into a freehand art that uses the writing brush. Due to this fact, the calligraphy, as the highest level of Chinese art spirit, it can best represent the art spirit of oriental arts and the Chinese characters culture circle.
In recent years, with the promotion of reform, Chinese comprehensive national strength has been remarkably enhanced, and Chinese calligraphy art, which has a unique national style, is one of the flags. The emblem design of 2010 Shanghai World Expo is similar to Chinese character “Shi”, which means the world, has been perfectly combined with the number “2010” to achieve complementarity (Xu 39). It has employed Chinese calligraphy art in the design as the “Shi” word is made graphical like three people embracing each other in arms, which just looks like a happy family of three; It can also be seen as an abstract summarization of mankind “you, me and him”. The emblem expressed the Expo concept of “understanding, communication, togetherness, and cooperation”, and is permeated with the Chinese national spirits of harmony and unity, embodying the people-oriented pursuing of the 2010 Shanghai World Expo.
In general, the development history of Chinese calligraphy is the history of humanity awakening and life lifting-up. Through aesthetic and calligraphic art practice, people are constantly improving themselves during the development of the social relationship. The attitudes of blind anti-tradition and denying history result from the lack of understanding of traditions and history (40). Similarly, the stubbornness of sticking to tradition and resisting any cultural transformation and the paradigm change of calligraphy art comes also from lacking understanding of the world cultural context. Today, people create and appreciate the calligraphy not just for yearning towards the past, but for pulling people into history, tradition and culture to listen and query. This touching art can place people in the deep cultural dialogue to face answers and questions in communication. Each roll of calligraphy in the history is the epitome of human nature, and is telling us the story of that world. Thus we can find the meaning of life for ourselves.
Same as calligraphy, seal cutting is also a unique art of the Chinese nation based on Chinese character fonts. The emblem of Beijing 2008 Olympic Games “Chinese seal, the dancing Beijing” has deliberately incorporated Chinese calligraphy seal cutting, referring to China’s nation identity confirmation (Guo 25). The emblem has employed the image and pattern of Chinese seal cutting to show the new image of China, and integrated Chinese culture into the spirit of games. This represents the charm of oriental cultures. The character “Jing” is processed into an abstract image of a running athlete, whose flexibility, resolution and grace touched six billion people. Generally speaking, seal cutting pays attention to the symmetrical balance and complementarity full of contradictions but harmony. This design of seal cutting art is endowed with the beauty of both dynamic dance and rhythmed music. The epigraphy interesting effect shows China’s unique culture, which is brought about by the text content, composition structure and stokes in font, and has bountiful and colorful aesthetic value.
The structure of this seal cutting is natural and patulous with vitality in fluency, and joy in force. The red seal body characterizes the state of mind of contemporary Chinese. It adopts the irregular printing form of private person, instead of the rigorous official formation. This style is a symbol of the extending free spirit of Chinese cultural indications. The humanity implication conveyed by it is not limited to sport games. China has also suggested the wish to introduce the seal cutting culture to worldwide by the “Chinese feature” of the characters culture represented by the emblem.
Chinese calligraphy and seal cutting culture should have got into the real conversation with cultures from “first world” in the modern society, to show its unique existence value in the special cultural expression way. They are the epitome of the tradition and culture of five thousand years’ history of China, as well as a reflection of the wisdom of Chinese people. As the nation token, it is not only recognized by China’s all walks of life in various ways, but has also been known by our neighbor nations, among which the most typical countries are Japan and South Korea (Bai 12). Now Japan has named it as “writing Tao”, and South Korea the “calligraphic art”, both venerating the precious Chinese character art. This is conducive to the spread of culture and the development of the positive neighborhood.
2. The character pronunciation art in terms of the origin and application of homophonic culture
Used as a kind of artistic technique of expression, homophonic appeared as early as in The Book of Songs. In the poem “Zhou Nan, Fu Yi”, “Fu Yi” (Asiatic plantain) is the homophonic of “embryo”. “Cai Cai Fu Yi” means praying for the child by picking Asiatic plantain. During Wei Jin South and North dynasties, there was “picking songs from the folk to observe the customs”, and the folk songs could be read and sung, which suited both the refined and popular tastes. Thus, the poetry exhibited more of the phonetic rhetoric, overlapping tone, double sound, and vowel rhyme, etc. of the folk songs. Homophonic also played an important role in it. Later when folk song became a kind of significant cultural form of China, the phonetic rhetoric developed to its largest degree. The most common homophonic puns were “silk” and “thinking”, and “lotus” and “pity”, which flourished at that time. In Tang and Song dynasties, “legend” and “story-telling script” appeared (Yonghong 245). The special speaking art needed to rely on this tactful way to make the text livelier. Reading the legend of Tang and the story-telling script of Song Dynasty, we will find that this art has the characteristics of euphemism and humor, focusing on the expression of wary phrase and clever hidden words, which should be owing to the homophonic. In Jin and Yuan dynasties, due to the national oppression, literature and art had a negative effect, in which homophonic, euphemism, metaphor and allusion rhetoric were a must in writing. To Qing Dynasty, the frequent literary inquisition placed pressure on the writers, who would hold their pen and employed homophonic as far as they can. Thus the transference of the meanings by homophonic and taboo were intensified. At that time, the homophonic was no longer playing its role as a rhetoric to polish the text, but was used more as a coat by the author to self-protect and an innuendo weapon.
The appearance of homophonic has its special cultural foundation. Due to the traditional Confucianism, almost every Chinese holds the natural moderation. This thinking mode makes the Chinese tender and gentle. This can be seen in the writing by opposing to the direct emotional expression or attack. All is following the principles of grace, peace, and gentleness in circuity and euphemism for a “pointing at one but abusing another” description; In addition, the Chinese’s are not like the westerners good at judging things with a precise concept or definition, they take a typical point of view of relationships (Guo 17). Therefore, the meaning relationship in their words is easy to be understood; Furthermore, from the perspective of modern culture, people are full of modern thoughts and pursue freshness, peculiarity and changes, and the conventional type of description has been unable to meet the young people’s needs. They demand some peculiar expression to zigzag express their emotions, and a series of peculiar words in the new era are created. Homophonic has contributed a lot to the creation of such words. These three aspects together constitute the homophonic culture foundation.
The use of homophonic of Chinese characters is one part of the traditional Chinese auspicious culture, as well as the crystallization of the wisdom of the masses during one thousand years. It is full of hopes and dreams of the people, meanwhile, the wonderful wishes and dreams have encouraged people to fight and struggle (20). By unremitting efforts of generation after generation, the development and progress of the society has been promoted.
In recent years, however, some Chinese businessmen would play some words game to attract the public attention in pursuit of advertising effect. For example, they changed some idioms in the advertisements. The meaning of “being reluctant to leave” in “Yi Yi Bu She” has been substituted by “not to give up the clothes”, and the original idioms like “Ting Ting Yu Li”, “Bo Da Jing Shen”, “Da Zhi Ruo Yu”, “Ji Bu Ke Shi”, “Shou Qu Yi Zhi”, “Jiu Fu Sheng Ming”, “ You Shi Wu Kong”, “Wu Wei Bu Zhi”, etc., have all been changed in the meaning by the use of homophonic. It seems that only the original meanings have been changed by the so-called advertising creativity, but in essence this is the blasphemy to the traditional culture of our country (Yonghuo 243). Zhang Yi, one of the representatives of People’s Congress in Beijing, said after the investigation, “The misuse of Chinese characters has created social harm to a large degree. It has a negative confusing impact on the correct understanding and consciousness formation of the national culture. It is also misleading to teenagers.”
Besides the non-standard advertising language, the more and more trendy and confusing cyber language also triggered the “mother language confusion”. People who live long with the abalone would not smell its stink. Chaos of the language environment makes people less sure about their mother tongue. Therefore, every Chinese should realize that the use of Chinese characters is a serious matter, specification in use of Chinese characters means to respect our national culture.
The normalization of characters does not only play a role in constructing the socialist spiritual civilization and advanced culture, but also helps promote the economic and social development. The phenomenon similar to the homophonic advertising against the national culture should be paid great attention by us. Beijing Administration for Industry and Commerce has been banning the homophonic advertising, which is a strong response based on the recognition of the reality.
All forms of Chinese character arts based on the Chinese characters have been under the influence of national culture. Therefore, the appreciation and inheritance of the character arts must never be separated from the national culture. We should also focus on its development from the perspective of the historical cultural traditions, making it accepted by more and more people, and improve the cultural soft power of China.