Mi Fu: Style and the Art of Calligraphy in Northern Song China.

• Author: LACHMAN, CHARLES
• Position: Review

Mi Fu: Style and the Art of Calligraphy in Northern Song China. By PETER CHARLES STURMAN. New Haven: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1997. Pp. xi + illus. $35.

Calligraphy has traditionally been given pride of place in the hierarchy of the arts in China; indeed, as the handsome dust jacket of this volume informs us, calligraphy was the primary means of graphic expression for the Chinese literati. But while Chinese calligraphy--or at least certain popular perceptions about its nature--has even come to occupy a well-defined niche in modernist art criticism (where it is routinely invoked in discussions of artists such as Franz Kline, Mark Tobey, and Jackson Pollock), within the field of Chinese art history scarcely more than a handful of books treat the subject in anything more than a comparably popular way. If for no other reason than that it helps to correct the serious imbalance between monographs devoted to individual painters and those devoted to calligraphers, the appearance of Peter Sturman's Mi Fu: Style and the Art of Calligraphy in Northern Song China would be a welcome event; happily, there are many more reasons to applaud the arrival of this study of the famously eccentric Mi Fu (1052-1107 or 1108), celebrated connoisseur, critic and calligrapher.

Sturman begins his book with a discussion of the fundamental principle of much aesthetic criticism in China; namely, that art has the power to convey the essential qualities of an individual. He also invokes the contemporary aesthetician Berel Lang in this context, claiming that Lang's idea about "style as person largely matches the concept of style in traditional China" (p. 6). This last may well be true, but so what? The brief explication here of Lang's work does little to elucidate the Chinese concepts at hand; indeed, this whole comparative exercise feels somewhat strained and gratuitous. The "Introduction" ends with a brief overview of the Chinese writing system, including script types and a description of basic calligraphic strokes.

For many readers, chapter one ("'Ideas' and Northern Song Calligraphy") will function as the real introduction to the book. Here, Sturman offers a cogent analysis of the Ming theorist Dong Qichang's capsule summation of the early history of calligraphy, which linked writing of the Jin period with "resonance" (yun), the Tang period with "method" (fa), and the Song with "ideas" (yi). Paying particular attention to the views of Ouyang Xiu, Su Shi, and Huang Tingjian...