What is the beauty of Chinese characters? Please give a detailed answer.

On the image beauty and abstract beauty of Chinese character configuration

Calligraphy is a plastic art based on Chinese characters. Mr. Jin Kaicheng regards Chinese characters as the first "hardware" of calligraphy art. In calligraphy, Chinese characters can not only provide the content of sentences for calligraphers, but more importantly, their own configuration is a beautiful form, which is the key to the existence of calligraphy beauty.

On the Pictographic Beauty of Chinese Character Configuration

The pictographic beauty of Chinese character configuration is different from the abstract beauty of Chinese character configuration. The former refers to the image formed by directly describing the objective world at the beginning of word creation, which is consistent with the meaning of the word. It has aesthetic feeling, but only at the basic level. The latter is the essence of the beauty of Chinese character configuration.

China's Chinese characters are self-originated. At the beginning of writing, they are all "morphemes" like Xiao Sheng's pictographs (there may be some dots and lines as reference). In the evolution of history and the development of characters, these "morphemes" become "the motivation of word-making", and as components and characters, new characters are constantly formed. These "morphemes" and "word-making motives" are also constantly developing into characters and becoming "basically non-pictographic" components, but they originated from images and are the genes of Chinese characters with image beauty. The theory of "pictographic characters", "pictographic" and "pictographic" of the origin of Chinese characters fully affirmed the pictographic beauty of Chinese characters.

The more primitive the text, the more pictographic it should be. Calligraphy and painting are homologous. In the early days of Chinese characters, hieroglyphics existed. Tang Lan believes that the original text only has graphics, and the graphics of various objects are used to express more complex meanings. (1) Zhou Youguang said: "Words originated from pictures. The original picture has developed in two aspects, on the one hand, it has become a picture art, on the other hand, it has become a word technology. The original written materials can be divided into printmaking, rock painting, text painting and picture writing. "

Therefore, pictographic characters are an important feature of Chinese character configuration, as Mr. Liu Gangji said: "When calligraphers write Chinese character symbols, they are endowed with images that can arouse people's aesthetic feeling. All the beauty in the world is perceptible in image, and beauty without image has never existed. "

However, the image of this kind of simulacrum is the basis and pictographic beauty of Chinese character configuration, but it is not the highest beauty of Chinese character configuration. Some calligraphers strive to embody this image in their books and write the Chinese characters in the books as close as possible to the objective image expressed. Facts have proved that the overall aesthetic feeling of such books is not high. The beauty of Chinese character configuration is an abstract beauty of image, which reflects the situation, form or situation of the image of things and is the sublimation of the image.

The abstract beauty of Chinese character configuration

Describing objective images is the main means of our ancestors at the beginning of word-making. When words appear, they present the images of some things, which is not much different from painting. However, we didn't see so many vivid and picturesque images in archaeological research, but more abstract and distinctive ideograms. This is mainly determined by the function of words, mainly ideographic and phonological, and it is enough for everyone to know. Of course, the simpler and more striking the shape, the better. This is the foundation of the abstract image beauty of Chinese character configuration. In this regard, most scholars believe that Chinese characters are abstract from the beginning, and even though some of them are pictographic, they are abstracted soon afterwards. According to Mr. Qian Mu, China's writing was written at the earliest. "Although it is pictographic, it soon entered the scope of' image meaning' and' image object'. ④

But the abstract form of Chinese characters is more vivid and aesthetic than the pictographic concrete form mentioned above. As Zong Baihua pointed out: "Chinese characters are pictographic. There is a pictographic basis and artistry. It turned out to be pictographic, and later Chinese characters gradually became more and more abstract ... However, in the bones, this spirit was still retained. " ⑤ This is only one aspect of the beauty of abstract images of Chinese characters. Its more profound significance lies in that the abstract image beauty of Chinese character configuration is a kind of life image, an image beauty of strength and an essential beauty of Chinese character configuration. Understanding form from the perspective of force image is the essence of human perception.