Strokes of enigmatic elegance

The art of shodo, traditional Japanese calligraphy, is a graceful blend of poise and penmanship, rhythm and stillness, writes…

The art of shodo, traditional Japanese calligraphy, is a graceful blend of poise and penmanship, rhythm and stillness, writes Arminta Wallace.

It's an art of line, form, space and rhythm. It incorporates movement and stillness, expression and silence. It combines the cognitive power of literature with the visual punch of painting. It demands the correct physical posture and spiritual focus. It can be breathtakingly delicate or laugh-out-loud funny - and it's all done with a few swift strokes of a brush on paper.

The creation of a piece of shodo, or Japanese calligraphy, takes just minutes - or even seconds. The characters must be written only once, and sneaky alterations, additions or touch-ups are not allowed. To the untutored Western eye it's a pretty enigmatic business, but even so it's obvious that here is an extraordinarily expressive and evocative world; and an exhibition of contemporary Japanese calligraphy which is currently running at the Atrium at the Office of Public Works offices on St Stephen's Green in Dublin, provides a rare opportunity to get up close and personal with this artistry of a floating world.

ONE OF THE first questions one is tempted to ask is, Don't Japanese writers ever scribble? They do, of course. When they note down e-mail addresses or shopping lists, most Japanese grab a biro or whatever comes to hand, and get jotting. But the exquisite penmanship we call "calligraphy" is a major part of contemporary Japanese culture. Primary school children are taught the basics from a young age, and at the beginning of each calendar year, it's traditional for them to create calligraphic works which symbolise their wishes for the coming 12 months. Pieces of calligraphy are also created as birthday gifts, as New Year cards and for other special occasions in Japan.

READ MORE

As they get more adept, students practise by imitating the style of famous calligraphers from the past. Many adult Japanese also pursue calligraphy as a hobby, and calligraphy associations ensure that the work is carried out to a high standard, awarding prizes to the calligraphers who are judged to have produced the most successful pieces. Works of calligraphy are admired for the accurate composition of their characters, for the way the brush is handled as they're being made, the shading of the ink and the balanced placement of the characters on the paper. When the lines are straight they should be strong and clear; when curved, delicate and mobile. The scale of the characters in relation to the whole piece is also crucial.

Far from producing a standardised, "approved" style, however, the acceptance of these basic precepts seems to have liberated contemporary calligraphers to an unprecedented degree. A glance at the catalogue for the Dublin exhibition, which has been put together by the Shodo Geijutsu-In Foundation, or Association of Japanese Calligraphy, shows that the pieces range from works of filigree fineness which we might think of as "typically Japanese", such as Syoen Takahashi's Spring, through Baikei Miyazawa's witty Worn-Out Footwear to Chokei Kato's Mother and Child, which might be a detail from a painting by Joan Miró, or Chikako Hiraoka's Sunrise, which is redolent of a Rothko.

The apparently endless number of variations on a distinctively Japanese theme is all the more remarkable given that this 3,000-year-old art form originally came to Japan from China. Though it had a highly developed tradition of oral poetry, the Japanese language appears to have had no written form until the arrival of Buddhist monks during the Han dynasty - somewhere between the birth of Christ and the fifth century CE. By the 10th century, shodo - "the way of writing" - was in full flow. Exquisite works on dyed paper known as "cloud paper", or on paper decorated with gold and silver flower motifs, were being made by courtly Japanese calligraphers such as Ki no Tsurayuki and Ono no Michikaze, and the two following centuries are generally seen as the "golden age" of classical Japanese calligraphy.

The seeds of individual expression had been sown from the beginning. Several distinct styles of script are used in Japanese writing. The original Chinese characters, known as kanji, correspond to individual words.

Additional words are created by combining characters - "electricity" plus "car", for example, gives "train". When adopting kanji characters, the Japanese associated them with the corresponding, native Japanese words and their pronunciations, and in modern Japanese they're used for writing nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs. But Japanese cannot be written entirely in kanji. For grammatical endings and foreign words, two additional, syllable-based scripts are used: hiragana and katakana, known collectively as kana. Of these, hiragana is more cursive, while katakana characters are quite angular.

AS IF THAT wasn't enough variety, the original Chinese characters were written by the Japanese in a variety of different ways. There was tensho, or seal script; reisho, or scribe's script; kaisho, or square style, the Japanese equivalent of block capitals in Roman alphabets; gyoso, or semi-cursive script and sosho, or cursive script. The fact that men and women developed quite distinctive styles of written Japanese - the clerical classes who could read Chinese in the original would write using a considerable portion of kanji, while women, who could not, used only the Japanese kana syllables - further complicates the already labyrinthine history of Japanese calligraphy. So does the fact that from the 13th century onwards, military governments in Japan tended to favour a more vigorous, pragmatic style of writing over the polished elegance of the older aristocratic models.

Various elements of traditional Japanese culture played their parts in this complex story. The appreciation of good calligraphy was, for instance, an integral part of the tea ceremony, with specially-composed pieces known as "tea scrolls" being mounted in the display alcove of a tea ceremony room so that participants could study and enjoy them. The ritual copying of Zen Buddhist scriptural texts - a devotional tradition which, it's worth noting, had a good deal in common with the elaborate textual decoration found in the ninth-century Book of Kells and other ancient Irish manuscripts - also influenced certain styles of calligraphy.

EVEN TODAY, JAPANESE calligraphers insist that in order to produce a perfect work of calligraphy, both body and mind must be properly prepared. Think, they say, of Zen archery, which is not about an archer firing an arrow at a target, but the quality of the archer's inner thoughts at the moment when the arrow is released: if the thoughts are properly in focus, the target will draw the arrow to itself. The creation of a piece of calligraphy offers something of the same process of inner focus and external expression.

The Sho exhibition is at the Atrium, Office of Public Works, 51 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, until Apr 19

On show Japan and Ireland

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Japan and Ireland, the Japanese embassy is hosting a series of celebratory exhibitions and events this year.

A photographic exhibition, 100 Years of Tokyo, will open at the OPW on April 30th, while another series of photographs, Scenes of Childhood: 60 Years of Post-War Japan, will be mounted at the same venue in June.

On June 14th there will be a concert of shamisen, traditional Japanese stringed instruments, at the National Concert Hall in Dublin; the concert will be repeated at City Hall in Cork on June 16th.