Princeton goes to the Metropolitan

Standing agape in the Chinese Gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I struggled to find the words to describe the graceful characters that composed the scroll of ancient and mysterious text in front of me. Finally I settled on simply enjoying the variety of startling shapes that can be created solely with ink lines.

Even to those who cannot read Chinese, the beauty of calligraphy speaks for itself.

To discover this art for yourself, make the trip to New York to see an exhibit of enchanting art pieces that originated on the other side of the world but recently traveled straight from Princeton.

"The Embodied Image: Chinese Calligraphy from the John B. Elliott Collection" — which appeared in the spring of 1999 at Princeton's art museum — is currently on display through Jan. 7 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The exhibit enjoyed flattering reviews while at the University, and the acclaim has continued at the Met. Earlier this month, The New York Times selected the exhibition catalogue as one of the best art books of 1999.

Cary Liu '78, associate curator of Asian art at the art museum, asserted, "Really this is totally a Princeton show." Liu acted as co-curator for "The Embodied Image" in conjunction with project coordinator Dora Ching, a graduate student in Princeton's art and archeology department, and guest curator Robert E. Harrist, Jr., associate professor of art and archeology at Columbia University.

John B. Elliott '51 amassed the collection that serves as the meat of the exhibit. Accompanying Elliott's collection are a few pieces from Princeton's Gest Library, which Liu categorized as "probably one of the four best libraries in the world for Chinese study." The Met also added multiple pieces from the John Crawford collection.

The show explores the meaning of Chinese calligraphy as an "embodied image" — an image encompassing different aspects of Chinese culture and history. "Calligraphy has the ability to embody many things," Ching explained. She specified sacrifice and omens, death ritual and records as some of these qualities.

Liu described the exhibit as searching for "meaning of calligraphy" by grappling with such questions as, "Why is it the premier art form in China?" and "Why is it more important than painting [in that country]?"

"[The character in calligraphy] is not representation, though that's a factor. It's not abstraction, though it can be perceived as such," said Liu of the pictographic nature of the writing. "So what are these characters embodying? What is the character? The character embodies the characteristics of what it supposedly represents."

The exhibit presents the beautiful art form and these questions behind it to a Western audience just getting its collective feet wet. "Let's face it," Liu said. "Chinese calligraphy is a very hard subject for Western audiences to get into."

Ching agreed. "To present Chinese calligraphy to mostly a Western audience, you have to make it understandable," she said.

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"How to present [calligraphy] to the public is a real challenge," Liu said. "So far people have done it by style, or comparisons to abstract expressionism. We're trying to say, 'Let's take the next step.' "

The next step is "reading the calligraphy," or analyzing it in terms of its significance within China. The curators selected a "core group of really wonderful works," according to Ching. To build a structure for the exhibit, they "fit them into a chronological story," the drama of the "four revolutions" of Chinese calligraphy.

Prior to the first "revolution," calligraphy developed primarily as an imperial tool to communicate with and even subdue the public.

In a small glass case in the corner of the exhibit, one encounters an intriguing example of an early form of calligraphy, a thin curved slab called an "oracle bone." Imperial court sages drilled holes into the bone and inserted hot pokers.

While the emperor verbally asked a yes-or-no question of a deity, the heat caused many small, fine cracks to spread across the bone surface. The court sages read the divine response in these lines and rewrote the message in imperial script directly on the bone.

From this form of writing, different standardized scripts evolved through the 4th century, A.D. Liu said these early scripts "are intended to communicate — and communicate power."

In the first "revolution" in the 4th century, A.D., the artist Wang Hsi-Chih transformed calligraphy into a mode of individual expression by developing his own personal style of writing. "[Wang] is so important he becomes a model for everyone afterwards," Liu said.

Unfortunately, Wang's original texts have been lost. Thus, one of the gems of the exhibit is a copy of Wang's "Ritual to Pray for Good Harvest," which, according to Liu, is "as close as you're going to get to an original Wang."

The text translates only to a fragment of a personal letter from Wang, but the dignified red seals of subsequent emperors attest to the letter's importance as a bridge between a standard and personal medium.

During the second revolution in Chinese calligraphy, government officials adopted Wang's more personal methods as the new official style. In reaction to this movement, the scholars in China began experimenting with styles that conveyed individual self-expression during the third revolution.

The scholar class manipulated the orthodox script based on Wang, experimenting with character size, tonality, abstraction and fluidity. Each artist generally copied the calligraphy of the previous masters for many years before developing his own style.

Ching explained that the major artistic question at the time was, "How do you practice calligraphy and be an innovator, not an imitator?"

The major pieces in "The Embodied Image" from this movement include Huang T'ing-chien's "Scroll for Chang Ta-t'ung." According to Liu, the exhibit marks the first time this scroll, one of the first pieces collected by Elliott, has been "unrolled and displayed in its entirety."

Today, such gorgeous Sung Dynasty scrolls are rare and hard to find on the market. Yet, as Liu explained, this was "not the situation when John B. Elliott and John Crawford were collecting in the 1960s and 70s."

Ching explained further that "the older the work, the more valuable it is," she said. "What made it particularly special for Elliott and Crawford was that the East was beginning to open up."

Ching said that Elliott selected exquisite art works at a time when they were not well-known in the West. He "bought pieces that sang to him, and that's without knowing any Chinese," she said.

Leading tours through the Met exhibit, Ching has noticed that her Western audiences seem a little lost amidst walls covered with strange, rhythmically dancing symbols. Laughing, she recalled that they appeared "so grateful to have someone talk about it to them." Yet despite the unfamiliarity of the calligraphy, the "very immediate kind of art really struck them."

Apparently there is no need to understand a language if its letters naturally speak to you.