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Last year at Tiananmen for 国庆

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Confession

That time when everyone hated on dubya’s paintings? I was annoyed. Poor form, internet. It’s possible for someone’s politics and their art to be independent of each other. http://www.myhoneyart.com/

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黄山西海

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'Phags-pa and nine-fold seal scripts

Around 1260, Kublai Khan commissioned ‘Phags-pa, Tibet’s viceroy, to create a unified script to be used across the entire Mongol empire. I’m guessing Tibetan, Mongolian, and Chinese were the main languages that needed to be transcribed with the new script. You can read about 'Phags-pa script, as it’s usually referred to in English, in more detail here on Babelstone.

A variation of this script is used in seals and for ornamental designs as seen here:

http://babelstone.blogspot.jp/2006/12/phags-pa-fonts-2-babelstone-phags-pa.html

The characters are actually the dark gray forms outlined in white. This lettering design does away with the usual hierarchy between positive and negative space. What is drawn/executed is the border, a continuous line that demarcates the strokes of each character. We want to read this intricate line as the foreground when it is in fact only the outline of the characters. The visual effect is similar to the Rubin face optical illusion, in which our brains switch between seeing two faces or a vase. I like that the design creates this visual tension. Also I dig the maze-like structure.

One thing I like about ‘Phags-pa seal script is the geometric regularity in its right-angles and the sense of compression due to the emphasis on the horizontal strokes. Nine-fold script (九叠篆), created during the Song dynasty, has similar qualities. This script was used for imperial seals and is purposefully intricate for that reason. Here is an example from Baidu Baike:

Essentially, additional U-curves are added to characters, sometimes where they already existed, sometimes to plain vertical strokes. The number of folds does not have to equal nine, fewer or more can be added. Here are some surnames written in the script:

Again, I really like the stark geometry of these characters, in contrast to the typical seal scripts people like to use. I think this grandpa in Xinjiang shares my love of nine-fold script. He used bamboo to plait an entire poem-ful of nine-fold script characters. However, the content seems to be celebrating the CPC’s 90th anniversary so I’m not exactly sure what’s going on. 

Finally, I want to show you a seal I really like that uses neither ‘Phags-pa nor nine-fold script. I think this design is very beautiful, especially how the two characters and the radicals within them are nestled together. Balance is an important element in all the different seals examined in this post, but here we can really see the designer’s sense for it. 

Here are some cool resources I found while investigating this subject:

The hundred family surnames (百家姓) written in nine-fold script can be found here.

You can explore how different characters were written in different scripts with this dictionary.

You can use this resource to view seals carved by (presumably?) famous people with specific characters.

(Pretty random, but I started down the rabbit hole because of this Quora question.)

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Chinese chops (not suey)

I recently started learning to carve Chinese chops (印章) so that I could make one as a gift for a friend. Like many traditional Chinese crafts, this is one with infinite depth, but I wanted to share some cool things I learned while investigating this art form.

What I love most is seeing the variety of styles and forms. Chinese seals are used as a signature of sorts and generally contain the owner’s name or the name of an establishment. Different scripts were used in different time periods, which results in very different looking seals. People tend to lean towards using older scripts because they’re more intricate and figurative. However, modern Chinese script can also look good when care is put into the design of the seal. This image shows seals using a range of fonts and scripts:

The captions under each seal are the characters contained in the seal written in modern script (p.s. these are sayings, not names). You can see that there’s quite a difference for some of the seals!

One artist’s seals I particularly enjoy are those of 齐白石 (Qibaishi), a famous 20th century Chinese ink painter. His designs deviates far from the norm but I think they’re very expressive owing to the proportions within the characters and the entire seal.

See more of his seals here.

Next time I’ll show you some 九叠篆 and Tibetan Phags-pa script seals that I think are really cool.

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Near Huangshan at Feicui Gu. Mom, exasperated, asking people to move so she can take a photo of a sight she doesn’t care about.

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I painted

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i’m not an events photographer

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Church on Spilt Blood

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St. Petersburg x Guatemala, 2011 x 2013

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St. Petersburg x SF 2011

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One of the nicest people you’ll meet :) 

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Cutie. Cousins visiting Beijing.

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