The new face of contemporary calligraphy
When people first see Ho Ching Chwang’s calligraphy, they typically come away with a profound impression of her innovative style, marked by slender, gangling strokes. Many people know her work through her calligraphic postcards decorated with playful variations on Chinese sayings, such as mao fei jia run—“may your cat be fat and your home be rich”; you tusi you cai—“to have toast is to be rich” instead of you tu si you cai—“to have land is to be rich”; or fu bi Aiqin Hai, shou bi Shaonü Feng—“may your happiness be as boundless as the Aegean Sea, may you be as long-lived as the Jungfrau” instead of the traditional birthday greeting fu bi Dong Hai, shou bi Nan Shan—“may your happiness be as boundless as the Eastern Sea, may you be as long-lived as the Southern Mountains.” These childlike verses rarely fail to delight. Combining her keen observation of life’s textures with her original calligraphic style and her sense of humor, Ho has created the highly distinctive “Ho Ching Chwang script.”
Inspired by a work of Taiwanese calligrapher Grace Tong, Ho took up the brush herself, but she did not take the conventional route toward the study of calligraphy. She abandoned standardized calligraphic styles, such as the seal script (zhuanshu), clerical script (lishu), standard script (kaishu), and semi-cursive script (xingshu). Instead she took an unconventional path focusing on the composition of the characters. But just how did she establish her personal style? “I just created my own content,” she says.
About ten years ago when Ho was living in London, the exchange rate was approaching NT$70 to the pound sterling, resulting in exorbitant prices and making her treasure each experience in her daily life. It was at this time that she began to integrate calligraphy into her own artistic works. Rather than copying out traditional works for practice, Ho copied contemporary poetry, essays, and even newspaper articles in order to make her work more relevant to contemporary life. Traditional calligraphy emphasizes seclusion and meditation, but Ho preferred to pack up a calligraphy set—paper, ink, brush, and ink stone—and practice in noisy coffee shops as the mood struck her. And unlike most artists who prefer to exhibit in museums and galleries, Ho generally shows her work in restaurants, hotels, college campuses, and other public settings. Ho’s calligraphy exemplifies the possibilities and charm of a new style of calligraphy.
It is difficult to assess Ho’s calligraphy from a conventional aesthetic viewpoint, yet her work has stimulated interest in calligraphy from a wider audience. Today she continues to cultivate the spirit of “inspirational poetry” and “impromptu exhibiting” that she developed while she was in England, and devotes herself to savoring life’s little moments and capturing them through calligraphy, creating diverse magical scenes using 30 x 30 centimeter sheets of rice paper.
Creating calligraphic postcards one brushstroke at a time.