"Zhao Ji Kaishu Mid-Autumn Moon Poems"

Exhibition: Forbidden City, Tea World: Watching Tea - Tea Culture Boutique Cultural Relics Exhibition

展期：展至2025年4月6日

Venue: Zhejiang Provincial Museum

Zhejiang Provincial Museum's "Forbidden City, Tea World: Watching Tea - Tea Culture Boutique Cultural Relics Exhibition" appeared several Song Dynasty celebrity calligraphy works have attracted a lot of attention, among which Zhao Ji of Song Huizong Zhao Ji's "Regular Script Leap Mid-Autumn Moon Poems" and "Zhao Ji Kaishu Tangtang Flowers, Bamboo Shoots and Stones Two Poems Scroll" as the highlights, "Thin Gold Book" once again aroused heated discussions.

Zhao Ji Painting Loquat Mountain Bird Picture Page

How to achieve thinness and beauty

Thinness is a measure of beauty. There is no doubt that when you use this word to describe people, most people will be happy. It is natural for people and characters to be natural, because the root of Chinese characters is in their pictographic nature.

Du Fu in the Tang Dynasty had a poem: Books are expensive, thin and hard, and they are spiritual. Calligraphy should write a thin and hard feeling, and the lines must have bone strength, so that it can be called a god. Du Fu's aesthetic pursuit is in line with the aesthetic standards of calligraphy in the early Tang Dynasty. Generally speaking, the style of the early Tang Dynasty inherited the rigor of the Sui monument, and the lines were mostly thin. Among the four great scholars of the early Tang Dynasty, Ouyang Xun was like this, Chu Suiliang was like this, and Xue Ji was even more so. Xue Ji's thinness also highlights the rigidity of the transition, which has the deepest relationship with Song Huizong's "thin gold body".

According to the record of "Xuanhe Painting", Zhao Ji studied calligraphy and painting, and one of his first teachers was Wu Yuanyu, who was active in the Shenzong period. This person liked Xue Ji's book, so the young Zhao Ji found a model for learning characters. Tall people tend to be thin, and thinness is therefore closely linked to length. Huang Tingjian, one of the "Four Song Families", was independent of the calligraphy world in the form of "spear and halberd" calligraphy, so much so that his teacher Su Shi half-jokingly described it as "a long snake hanging from a tree". Zhao Ji's book has three major supports, Ouyang Xun's rigorous knot, Xue Ji's deliberate bony brush, and Huang Tingjian's unrestrained strokes, and finally cast a unique "thin gold body" style of calligraphy.

From the orthodox point of view of calligraphy, it was difficult for Huizong's sharp font to enter the mainstream. Traditional calligraphy talks about "Tibetan Feng", "iron wrapped in cotton" and "soft on the outside and rigid on the inside", which is the experience of personnel in calligraphy. In the face of life's setbacks and sufferings, he kept forbearance, and introverted his tenacious will to survive to a situation that was extremely difficult for outsiders to detect, and transformed it into hiding the "edge" when writing. As the emperor, Huizong of the Song Dynasty developed a style of calligraphy that was completely different from the traditional aesthetics of Chinese characters. The "thin gold body" releases all the "edges" that should be "hidden" and exalts itself to the extreme, which is not unrelated to the special identity of the writer.

Although Song Huizong wrote the characters to the extreme of thinness, in terms of the essence of oriental aesthetics, there is still a layer of difference. In the context of oriental culture, thinness is sensual, and its highest state is precisely the pursuit of transcending the external body, so as to sublimate into a temperament and quality. For example, the thinness of the scholar is praising a kind of elegant brightness; To say that a gentle woman is thin is to appreciate a kind of beauty like water; It is said that the thinness of the old monk is a kind of enlightenment after years of wind and frost; Saying that "people are thinner than yellow flowers" is to sigh at a kind of haggard affection.

Therefore, in the history of calligraphy, Ouyang Xun's sinister thinness, Liu Gongquan's thinness and stiffness, Lin Hejing's coldness and thinness, and Ni Yunlin's quietness and thinness were more respected by literati.

Part of "Zhao Jikai's Book of Two Poems of Tangtang Flowers and Bamboo Shoots".

How to do it in a golden glow

After talking about the origin of "thinness" in the book of Huizong, it is also necessary to point out where "gold" comes from.

"Gold" is a metal, and for ordinary people, gold immediately comes to mind. In the Shang and Zhou dynasties, gold was more directed to bronze. "Jin Wen" is also known as "Zhong Ding Wen", a text engraved on bronzes. In the pre-Qin period, there was also a popular process, called "wrong gold", in which gold and silver wires or sheets were embedded in the grooves on the surface of the bronze, and the gold, silver and bronze surfaces were smoothed through grinding technology to form decorative patterns, which could not only make the decoration of the bronze more gorgeous, but also make the inscriptions more eye-catching, and this process had an aesthetic inspiration and guiding effect on calligraphy.

In the Northern Song Dynasty, it is recorded in the "Xuanhe Painting Spectrum: Li Yu": "Li can write and be good at calligraphy and painting. The book is a trembling pen (the same sound, meaning that the tree bends downward) in the form of a curve, as strong as a pine and frost bamboo, which is called a golden knife. Li Yu, the queen of the Southern Tang Dynasty, wrote a good hand, and later generations commented that it had the beauty of the inscriptions inlaid on the bronze.

The gold and silver filaments glitter on the dull bronze surface, which describes the beauty of Li Yu's calligraphy, which shows that his lines are sharp and give people a sense of shimmering light. Therefore, in order to understand the "thin gold body", we should connect the image and meaning of "thin" and "gold". In the history of calligraphy, there was also a "thin tendon book", which is another name for the "thin gold book". The use of "tendon" to describe the character is as prominent as the tendons and veins on the human body, which is a very vivid metaphor, but it lacks the beauty of "wrong gold".

Part of "Zhao Jikai's Book of Two Poems of Tangtang Flowers and Bamboo Shoots".

How to present skinny with gold

The three works of Huizong in this "Tea Culture" exhibition are similar in age from the perspective of calligraphy style. Every word on the post is thin and straight, and the strokes are stretched and beautiful. At the turning point, it is obvious that the calligrapher deliberately retains the traces of Zangfeng, Lufeng, and Teton, forming the characteristics of horizontal painting with hook, vertical painting with point, skimming like a dagger, pinching like a knife, vertical hook slender and restrained, and even the pen like flying and sharp.

The seven-character poem "Leap Mid-Autumn Moon" depicts the scenery of the Mid-Autumn Festival moonlit night, sincerely admiring the beauty of heaven and earth, and then conveying the poet's infinite emotion for the beautiful years. This impromptu poem was written in the eighth month of the leap month. In Zhao Ji's 29 years of life, he has experienced three leap Augusts, at the age of 0, 0 and 0. In the fourth year of Daguan (0 years), he was 0 years old and had spent ten years on the throne.

When he was in high spirits, he wrote: "The Mid-Autumn Festival is specially round, and the situation is clear and fresh. "The first couplet points out the time, connecting the osmanthus blooming in the Mid-Autumn Festival with the full moon, and the second half emphasizes the clarity and brightness of the moonlight." Because of the first menstrual month, the poet will not sigh in the next year, "pointing out that we should enjoy the good times of the present and not care about the passing past." "Vientiane gathers light to increase the vastness, and the four Ming collect the night to help Chanjuan", looked up at the moon again, this time noticed the brightness of the moonlight, and the heaven and earth appeared more boundless under its reflection. "The scales and clouds are clear and the heart is clear, and the joy can be without a chant", the fish-scale-like clouds, the sky is clear and smooth, and the poet wrote a poem in a beautiful mood. In the leap August when he was 29 years old, Zhao Ji had been captured by the Jin soldiers and was trapped in the city of the Five Kingdoms (now Yilan County, Heilongjiang Province). Does he remember moonshine when he was 0 years old?

"Two Poems of Regular Script, Tangtang Flowers, and Bamboo Shoots" wrote two poems with a sharp brush. "Begonia Flower" praises the color of the flower, making it stand out in the gorgeous and colorful "red and purple"; "Bamboo Shoots" depicts the tall and upright posture of bamboo shoots, admiring its sturdy and self-reliant quality. It's funny to think about it, the bamboo shoots praised by Zhao Ji just happened to constitute an irony against his life.

The words in this post, the knot in the middle palace is tightened, the center of gravity is raised, and the strokes diverge to the periphery. The single word is mostly exposed to the pen, the line to the turn, the pen place, the exaggeration, the mention of the distinct, the pen between the ribbon. Seeing the wind and bones, Zhao Ji gave an explanation of pen and ink. His original "Thin Gold Book" is an excellent embodiment of emulating his predecessors and incorporating personal opinions, from which he can feel his artistic confidence and talent.

Resist fat that is beautiful with thinness

In the first month of 19 AD, Song Zhezong died of illness, no children under his knees, and the Empress Dowager set up the eleventh son of Song Shenzong and the younger brother of Zhezong Zhao Ji as the emperor in the same month, and he was 0 years old this year. Before Zhao Ji became Song Huizong, he had the privilege of spending a carefree teenage life with the "Four Song Families".

As we all know, in "Su, Huang, Mi, Cai", Su Shi is the only one who has had a bumpy career and has been repeatedly degraded in his life. After Zhao Ji ascended the throne, the imperial court issued a general amnesty, and Su Shi, who was far away in Danzhou, was successively transferred to Lianzhou for resettlement, Shuzhou regimental training deputy envoy, and Yongzhou for resettlement, but in the second year, on the way back to the north, he died of illness in Changzhou, Jiangsu.

Zhao Ji must have had a relationship with Su Shi in his early years, because Su Shi's close friend Ma Duwei Wang Shu was also Zhao Ji's playmate and friend. Interestingly, Su Shi's calligraphy style is the opposite of Zhao Ji's "thin gold book", he is "fat" as beauty, and this is another extension of Chinese calligraphy. Among the four families of the early Tang Dynasty mentioned above, only Yu Shinan's handwriting is soft and elegant, sparse and calm. In particular, his treatment of the turning point is different from Zhao Ji's decisiveness and directness of breaking wood and breaking gold, he writes slowly, turning in an arc, and it seems that he cannot see the force, but the handwriting is flowing freely, as plain as water. Cai Xiang's book "Spring Post" in this exhibition belongs to this road.

In fact, behind this kind of brushwork carries the style of calligraphy from the Wei and Jin dynasties, which takes the regular script of Zhong Xuan and Wang Xizhi and Zhang Zhi and Suo Jing as the core, with the subordination of the two Han Dynasty, combined with the Wei and Jin dynasties in the penmanship to emphasize the technique of matching between the wrist and the fingers, so as to convey the beauty of neutrality advocated by Confucian culture. Yan Zhenqing in the Tang Dynasty extracted warmth and generosity from the writing of Yu Shinan in the early Tang Dynasty, and carried it forward, and finally formed the majestic and simple vigor of Yan Ti. On the basis of the calligraphy style of the Wei and Jin dynasties represented by Wang Xizhi, Su Shi of the Northern Song Dynasty extracted the heaviness of his face and body, integrated it into his true temperament, and created a kind of lazy beauty of relaxation.

Su Shi's font is the opposite of Zhao Ji's "thin gold book", which is mainly flat square, which his student and friend Huang Tingjian described as "stone-pressed toad body". Su Shi often leans slightly to the right when writing, which forms a huge contrast with the towering and rigid character of Zhao Ji's font. Su Shi's ink is thick and full, showing a "fat" posture, which is the opposite of "thin gold body".

If we pull the lens up and put the perspective far away, overlooking the entire Northern Song Dynasty book circle, there will undoubtedly be a conclusion that the personality is flying and the attitude is colorful. This is precisely the valuable writing practice and valuable aesthetic experience of the art of calligraphy in the Song Dynasty in the history of Chinese calligraphy.

Text/Wang Jiannan

Photo source/Zhejiang Provincial Museum "Forbidden City Tea World" special exhibition

Editor/Hu Keqing