The Meaning Composition of Chinese Calligraphy Sign

This paper clarifies the composition of meaning in the art of Chinese calligraphy on the basis of American semiotician Charles Morris’s three divisions of sign,namely,“Syntactics,Semantics,Pragmatics”.The syntactical dimension of Chinese calligraphy sign is the artistic meaning of the form of Chinese character.“Semantical dimension”refers to semantic referents of linguistic signs and their literary significance,“pragmatical dimension”refers to the use and interpretation of calligraphy.The study of the three dimensions of meaning in Chinese calligraphy reveals a complex and unique composition of sign meaning.Chinese calligraphy deforms the structure and form of Chinese characters while retaining their semantic invariance.In this way,calligraphy acquires more practical semantic and symbolic meanings through the carrier of Chinese characters which are also linguistic symbols at the same time.Chinese calligraphy is dominated by the meaning of sign forms,taking into account the linguistic reference and the use of sign,and the three dimensions of meaning interact and promote each other,building a dynamic and multidimensional space of sign meaning.

The Implantation Application of Traditional Chinese Calligraphy in Book Cover Design under Contemporary Aesthetic Trend

In the information age, the public’s aesthetic consciousness of art has changed dramatically, showing a new trend of pursuing abstraction and personalisation of art works. In this context, Chinese traditional calligraphy, which carries deep oriental cultural heritage and artistic taste, and is highly flexible and adaptable in terms of artistic form, has great application value in the field of book cover design. This paper first analyzes the trend characteristics of the development and transformation of public artistic aesthetic consciousness from the industrial era to the information age, and then explores the artistic form characteristics of traditional Chinese calligraphy, and proposes that traditional calligraphy has great application value in book cover design. Finally, several innovative and clever cases of incorporating traditional calligraphy into book cover design were highlighted, providing inspiration for design ideas and methods.

Robust visual servoing based Chinese calligraphy on a humanoid robot

A robust visual servoing system is investigated on a humanoid robot which grasps a brush in Chinese calligraphy task.The system is implemented based on uncalibrated visual servoing controller utilizing Kalman-Bucy filter,with the help of an object detector by continuously adaptive MeanShift(CAMShift) algorithm.Under this control scheme,a humanoid robot can satisfactorily grasp a brush without system modeling.The proposed method is shown to be robust and effective through a Chinese calligraphy task on a NAO robot.

Contemporary Chinese Calligraphy Between Tradition and Innovation

Since the mid-1980s Chinese calligraphy art has undergone a radical change and has opened itself to experimentation. A vivid debate on CCC （Contemporary Chinese Calligraphy） （Zhongguo xiandai shufa） is involving art critics in China nowadays. WANG Dongling and the modernists think that, despite many changes and influences, we can still refer to the traditional calligraphic lexicon to describe the calligraphic production of contemporary Chinese art. They still remain deeply rooted in the signified system of Chinese writing, even if they break with the strict rules of Chinese classical aesthetic （contamination of Western elements and focus on the stylistic exploration）. WANG Nanming and the Avant-garde think that ＂contemporary calligraphy is not calligraphy yet＂： It is ＂anti-calligraphy＂, annihilates Chinese tradition, rejects the use of legible characters, experiments with new languages and new media within the idiom of international contemporary art. The result is the creation of works of art that could be assimilated to Abstract art, Abstract expressionism, Conceptual art, Performance art, Contemporary dance, Multimedia art, and even Street art. This paper aims at showing how still valid and extremely productive are both these two theoretical and creative/practical approaches to Chinese calligraphy in China nowadays. They turned the art of calligraphy into a medium for global comprehension and communication.

Fractal Analyses Reveal the Origin of Aesthetics in Chinese Calligraphy

Chinese calligraphy is a thousand-year-old writing art. The question of how Chinese calligraphy artworks convey emotion has cast its spell over people for millennia. Calligraphers' joys and sorrows were expressed in the complexity of the character strokes, style variations and general layouts. Determining how Chinese calligraphy aesthetic patterns emerged from the general layout of artworks is a challenging objective for researchers. Here we investigate the statistical fluctuation structure of Chinese calligraphy characters sizes using characters obtained from the calligraphy artwork "Preface to the Poems Collected from the Orchid Pavilion" which was praised as the best running script under heaven. We found that the character size distribution is a stretched exponential distribution. Moreover, the variations in the local correlation features in character size fluctuations can accurately reflect expressions of the calligrapher's complex feelings. The fractal dimensions of character size fluctuations are close to the Fibonacci sequence. The Fibonacci number is first discovered in the Chinese calligraphy artworks, which inspires the aesthetics of Chinese calligraphy artworks and maybe also provides an approach to creating Chinese calligraphy artworks in multiple genres.

Chinese Guqin Music and Calligraphy for Treating Symptoms of Primary Insomnia

Purpose:To investigate the intervention effiects of using traditional Chinese Guqin music and Chinese Calligraphy handwriting(CCH)for patients with Primary Insomnia.Methods:A total of ninety patients were assigned to control group,Guqin group,and calligraphy group for 8 weeks.For 5 days a week,patients’heart rate variability(HRV)and frontal midline(FZ)electroencephalographic signals were recorded in a clinic during interventional period while either listening to Guqin music or writing calligraphy.Patients in the control group remained in rest condition.Results:For the Guqin group,the higher low-frequency-range HRV of coherence was found with marginal significance(P=0.055),and heart rate was significantly reduced(P<0.05)during Hie 4^th week in listening to Guqin music compared to the prerest period.For listening to Guqin music or calligraphy intervention,FZδ,FZθ,and FZα waves in the 8^th week compared to the 0^th week(Pre Intervention)showed a significantly enhanced effect(.P<0.05).Between the three groups,for heart rate and FZδ and FZθ waves,calligraphy group showed significantly increased heart rate than the Guqin group(P<0.001)and the control group(P=0.004);increased FZδ wave than die Guqin group(P<0.001)and the control group(P<0.001);and increased FZθ wave than the Guqin group(P=0.024)and the control group(P=0.008)respectively.Conclusion:Positive intervention effects on 11RV coherence of Guqin music;FZδ,FZθ,and FZα waves of Guqin music and calligraphy proved that Guqin music together with calligraphy training helping to promote physical and mental health,thereby it contributes to the clinical application of TCM Psychology for patients with insomnia syndrome.

Reconfiguration of the brain during aesthetic experience on Chinese calligraphy—Using brain complex networks

Chinese calligraphy,as a well-known performing art form,occupies an important role in the intangible cultural heritage of China.Previous studies focused on the psychophysiological benefits of Chinese calligraphy.Little attention has been paid to its aesthetic attributes and effectiveness on the cognitive process.To complement our understanding of Chinese calligraphy,this study investigated the aesthetic experience of Chinese cursive-style calligraphy using brain functional network analysis.Subjects stayed on the coach and rested for several minutes.Then,they were requested to appreciate artwork of cursive-style calligraphy.Results showed that(1)changes in functional connectivity between frontooccipital,fronto-parietal,bilateral parietal,and central–occipital areas are prominent for calligraphy condition,(2)brain functional network showed an increased normalized cluster coefficient for calligraphy condition in alpha2 and gamma bands.These results demonstrate that the brain functional network undergoes a dynamic reconfiguration during the aesthetic experience of Chinese calligraphy.Providing evidence that the aesthetic experience of Chinese calligraphy has several similarities with western art while retaining its unique characters as an eastern traditional art form.

What is ＂Chinese Modem Calligraphy＂？ An Exploration of the Critical Debate on Modem Calligraphy in Contemporary China

Since the mid-1980s Chinese calligraphy art has undergone a radical change and has opened itself to experimentation. Nowadays in China this artistic revolution has sparked a vivid debate among the art critics on three main topics： （1） definition of the phenomenon; （2） analysis of its nature; and （3） classification of the artistic production. In this article, all these aspects are analysed in order to give a comprehensive view of the present theoretical discussion and of its future development.

The Art of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy Mounting

The history of Chinese painting and calligraphy mounting can date back to the Warring States period(475-221 BC).This unique craftsmanship saw its heydays in

Hierarchical Approximate Matching for Retrieval of Chinese Historical Calligraphy Character

As historical Chinese calligraphy works are being digitized, the problem of retrieval becomes a new challenge. But, currently no OCR technique can convert calligraphy character images into text, nor can the existing Handwriting Character Recognition approach does not work for it. This paper proposes a novel approach to efficiently retrieving Chinese calligraphy characters on the basis of similarity： calligraphy character image is represented by a collection of discriminative features, and high retrieval speed with reasonable effectiveness is achieved. First, calligraphy characters that have no possibility similar to the query are filtered out step by step by comparing the character complexity, stroke density and stroke protrusion. Then, similar calligraphy characters axe retrieved and ranked according to their matching cost produced by approximate shape match. In order to speed up the retrieval, we employed high dimensional data structure - PK-tree. Finally, the efficiency of the algorithm is demonstrated by a preliminary experiment with 3012 calligraphy character images.

Technical features in the Portal to CADAL

China-America Digital Academic Library Project (CADAL) is a collaborative project between universities and institutes in China and the USA, which aims to provide universal access to large scale digital resources and explore the ways of applying multimedia and virtual reality technologies to digital library. The distinct characteristic of the resources in CADAL is that it not only contains one million digital books of different languages, but also contains Terabyte level multimedia resources (image, video, and so on), which are utilized for education and research purposes. So, in the Portal to CADAL, both the traditional services of browsing and searching of digital books, and the services of quickly retrieving and structurally browsing of multimedia documents should be provided. In addition, the services of visual presentation of retrieved results are required too. In this paper, the underlying novel multimedia retrieval methods as well as visualization techniques, which are used in the CADAL portal, are investigated.