On the last Friday before the Christmas holiday, we prepared a gift for our university’s 1st and 2nd year sinology students and invited them to the first distance calligraphy workshop. It seems that in times of pandemic we are already used to studying and working remotely, but trying calligraphy is both a new experience and perhaps another incentive to improve.
After all, Chinese calligraphy has occupied a unique place in traditional Chinese culture and art, and has maintained the continuity of classical aesthetic canons for more than 20 centuries. Even in China today, calligraphy classes are often integrated into the curriculum of secondary schools, and in some private primary schools, calligraphy is taught from the first grade.
Calligraphy for us, Westerners, is not only a sense of the origins of Chinese painting, but also a kind of meditation, a way of concentration and relaxation, which is much needed today. We are happy to offer this opportunity to the students of Vilnius University.
It is gratifying that students majoring in Sinology are eager to deepen their knowledge of Chinese culture. In these workshops they learned how to hold the brush correctly, master how to write calligraphy lines correctly, got acquainted with 5 calligraphy styles and learned to write the hieroglyph of happiness fú 福 in the kǎishū 楷书 style.
Thank you to our new partner, the East China Normal University in Shanghai, and to the wonderful calligraphy master Wang Yan 王彦, who is also our Chinese lecturer.
We are sure that in the new winter/spring semester we will see even more people interested in trying calligraphy at our institute.