"Chinese Modern Calligraphy" as a Reflection of Chinese Contemporary Culture: A Comparison between Modernism (Wang Dongling) and Avant-garde (Xu Bing)

Since the mid-1980s Chinese Calligraphy Art has undergone a radical change and has opened itself to experimentation. "Chinese Modern Calligraphy" has gradually lost its connection with Chinese language and has gradually strayed from the concept of being simultaneously the “art of writing characters” and the “art of writing expressive lines”. Of the four main currents that came into being from this moment onward, the Modernist and the Avant-garde better reflect the political, social, and cultural changes occurred in China in the last three decades. These two movements show the modernization process of Chinese calligraphy that aims at turning the art of calligraphy into an internationally comprehensible art form. Because of their different way of blending tradition and modernity, Chinese and Western thoughts, and local and global culture, they also reveal two antithetical but complementary approaches to the question of cultural hegemony in contemporary China. In this essay, I analyze these two different approaches by means of the artworks of two representative artists, Wang Dongling and Xu Bing, which clearly illustrate how Chinese Modern Calligraphy could be a reflection of the emerging trends in contemporary Chinese culture.