Chinese Calligraphy in the Digital Realm: Aesthetic Perfection and Remediation of the Authentic

Abstract

The fear that people are losing the ability to write by hand-carrying wider consequences with regards to culture, identity, and nationality-resonates widely in Chinese society. Due to the worldwide shift towards digital communication technology, the method by which an increasing number of people write Chinese characters has changed. Touchpads, mobile phones with software that allows one to choose characters from a list in pinyin, and voice recognition all reduce the time actually spent writing characters on paper. Practicing calligraphy offline is regularly hailed as a remedy to combat the demise of the written character. Arguing that media practices have always been subject to the material conditions of technology, this article contextualizes calligraphic practices occurring within new media as remediations of earlier practices. The digital realm, I suggest, is not a separate space, but part of the social totality of the everyday in which quotidian calligraphic practices can occur. Through an examination of calligraphy apps, an online calligraphy exhibition, the CADAL (China Academic Digital Associative Library) database, and personalized calligraphic fonts, this article endeavors to be an initial exploration of online calligraphic practices. I contend that rather than forming a rigid binary relationship with traditional calligraphy, these practices can be imagined as remediations, and as such, can generate inventive deviations from the dominant idea of what calligraphy is or should entail.