Quote:
Originally Posted by komitsuki
There is no huge difference between Japanese and Chinese calligraphy if you think about it. Anybody who is used to practice Chinese or Japanese styles can practice calligraphy in Korean alphabets without too much hassle.
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Not as such. First, calligraphy has nothing to do with alphabet, rather its implementation. In other words the way you write it, what you write is a secondary issue. Secondly, there are great differences between Chinese and Japanese calligraphy. Some Japanese styles could possibly not be accepted by the Chinese orthodox calligraphers. Zen calligraphy is only one example.
Current Korean alphabet cannot be studied the way Chinese or Japanese calligraphy is being performed, as it resembles western writing system more than Asian one. Chinese Characters are based on images and links between events, actions or items and their abstract reflection in a form of lines. Korean alphabet is phonetic. It's a completely different philosophy.
In simple words, writing calligraphy is simplified Chinese is a blasphemy and calligrapher practicing it will be ridiculed. The whole point of kanji compound idioms, be it 4, 3,7, 20 etc, is to feel the meaning and sort of live through it without reading it. In western language you read to understand then you feel, in Chinese and in calligraphic Japanese you look and you feel. Don't have to read it.
As an example see a calligraphy of a word 台風 meaning typhoon. Can you sense the wind?
Can you imagine merciless power of nature? Kanji only amplify what calligraphy is whispering, they are not the sense of calligraphy itself.
In fact 書道 is wrongly translated as calligraphy, or at least it is a great shortcut. As much as western calligraphy is all about writing beautifully, Chinese and Japanese calligraphy
are not. It's a
way of writing as a path to spiritual enlightenment through practice and studies. It cannot be compared to western art of calligraphy. It also does not mean that both of them have no aesthetic values.