Reading assignment: Chapters 1-4
I absolutely loved Chapter 3: The Asian Contribution. There's always so much history when it comes to China. They created paper, they built the Great Wall and they invented fireworks! All American children should thank the Chinese for endless sparklers and lighting things on fire. The Chinese may be the world's first pyromaniacs, just kidding. But jokes aside the Chinese were always about new innovations and changing the world. Yet the most creative aspect in my opinion is their calligraphy. It's so intricate and beautiful! I can only imagine people spending countless hours dreaming of all the different ways you could draw or create a new character. With over 44,000 characters it's hard to believe that skilled calligraphers knew them all.One of my favorite parts about calligraphy is the beauty in the strokes. They look effortless. There's so much precision yet it almost looks like a lazy person was just making things up. I love that in the early stages of chinese writing the characters are pictographic. Just like the early cave paintings these inscriptions are simple sketches created to tell a story. You can spot out a couple that look like stick figure people. I liked the idea that calligraphy was more personal and used feelings to tell a story. Looking at the photos of all the early examples of Chinese writing I tended to go towards the pictographs. It might just be the child in me but the images are easy to relate to since they have the child like quality. You can imagine children drawing these images because they don't know how to spell yet so they use images to explain themselves. Compared to later examples of Chinese writing the characters are not as easy to read and if you don't read Chinese then they're just strokes of ink.
Example of chin-wen inscriptions
I was able to connect my learning to the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. The logo for the Olympics has a calligraphic feel with its pictographic image. The image is a person or a stick figure to makes things simple. They use block printing techniques to make it look like a chop was used for imprinting the image. The font selection looks like modern calligraphy with it's clean strokes but also making it readable. The font has the stroke appearance and looks like a real calligraphy pen was used to write it. For the posters below the logo you can see in the background the simple image mimicking the body of the athlete. They're essentially pictographs of the sport. The one in the middle is doing martial arts and the pictograph behind them is also doing a high kick motion. In my opinion it looks like a modern take on ancient Chinese writing with modern images.
Posters from the 2008 Beijing Olympics
Overall the techniques used for ancient Chinese writing are relevant today. All these ancient pictographs are used in modern texting. Take emoticons/emojis for example. They use images as symbols of different emotions to tell a story. Instead of writing about your emotion you can just pick a face that explains how you feel. Even simple tasks like texting can be attributed to the earliest form of writing. I feel really appreciative of the innovations from the Chinese. The more I read and learn about the origins of graphic design and writing the more I notice things. Little things like paper don't seem so simple anymore.
Image sources:
Chin-wen inscription
2008 Beijing Olympics logo
2008 Beijing Olympics posters
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