北京｜鲁大东：文生图

After Qin unified the Six States and decreed the standardization of script, eight types of writing were said to exist. Among them, Great Seal Script (大篆), Small Seal Script (小篆), and Clerical Script (隸書) were considered formal hands. The remaining five—Tally Script (刻符), Bird-and-Insect Script (蟲書), Seal-Imitation Script (摹印), Official Script (署書), and Halberd Script (殳書)—were functional or decorative, what we might now call artistic lettering.

During Wang Mang’s reign, the sixfold classification of script distinguished Seal Script and Left Script (another form of Clerical Script) as normative, while Variant Seal and Bird-and-Insect Scripts served decorative purposes. Still earlier forms—Ancient Script and Strange Characters—were later nicknamed Tadpole Script for their curvilinear shapes.

石膏篆刻、综合材料

Plaster Seal Carving, Mixed Media

11x22x11cm

2025

On bronzes, weapons, seals, mirrors, and ritual banners, writing—once liberated from imagery—became pictorial once again.

What followed were centuries of cultivated excess among the elite. From Cai Yong and Wei Dan to the aristocratic Wang and Xie families, literati competed in displays of refined eccentricity. Young scholars emulated the fashion, and fine paper grew scarce. Their ornate calligraphy, painted on luxurious screens, was meticulously classified: from Wang Yin’s Treatise on Script (《文字志》) listing thirty-six styles, to Xiao Ziliang’s Ancient and Modern Seal and Clerical Styles (《古今篆隸文體》) listing fifty-two, to Wang Rong’s Illustrated Miscellaneous Scripts Ancient and Modern (《圖古今雜體》) with sixty-four. By the time of Yu Yuanwei’s On Calligraphy (《論書》) in the Liang dynasty, the number had reached one hundred.

油画布丙烯  Acrylic on Canvas

56x38cm

2025

Such proliferation appeared everywhere—on folding screens, plaques, epitaph stones, temple walls, and cliff inscriptions.

These characters were not only written but also painted, gilded, inlaid with silver, and carved in relief.

Jiuquanzi — Verdant Trees in Deep Spring

纸本水墨  Ink on paper

52x32cm

Paper, that “dimensional reduction” of material support, would not appear until nearly two millennia after the invention of writing. In Treatise on Calligraphy (《書譜》), Tang theorist Sun Guoting observed of such ornate scripts: “Their craft approaches painting, yet their brushwork falls short of true calligraphy.” His remark was not a dismissal but a distinction—acknowledging a divergence in artistic path.

From the ritual traditions of clans to the cultivated tastes of the literati, sensibilities shifted. The exquisite and the ornate seldom endure; even bronze and stone decay.

Dongxian Song — Jiangnan at Winter’s End

纸本水墨  Ink on paper

52x32cm

Modern histories of calligraphy, confronted with the fragmentary remnants of medieval aristocratic culture—texts without images, rhetoric without form—often speak with tones of condescension.

In recent years, I have read little but looked much.

Memorial of the Human Epoch

油画布丙烯  Acrylic on Canvas

66x55cm

2025

I take pleasure in reading images, in letting vision generate language. Confronting today’s versions of “when words become images,” I find the calligraphic sensibility lacking, and this fills me with quiet unease.

Thus, through the platform of the Space Station, I seek to stir the once-clear boundary between word and image.

Let them intertwine once more—

for words and images are mutually generative,

and the future will bear witness to their return.

By:Lu Dadong