The Calligrapher — Huáng Tíngjiān 黄庭坚

Song master of elongated, radical running and cursive script.

Song calligrapher (1045–1105), master of running script/cursive script — Song master of long, sweeping, deliberately stretched running strokes. Song dynasty

Cultural Story

篁 means a stand of bamboo, dense and shadowed. Wang Wei retired to his Bamboo Grove Pavilion: 独坐幽篁里,弹琴复长啸 — alone in the deep bamboo, playing the qin, whistling long. Garden design ever after sought that 幽篁 gloom: a green wall to screen the world out.

Common words & phrases

• 幽篁 secluded bamboo grove
• 竹篂 bamboo grove
• 丛篁 thicket of bamboo

Read the story behind the character

篁 is a poet's word kept alive by gardens and geography: scenic areas compete over their 千亩竹篁 (vast bamboo groves), guesthouses named 幽篁 promise morning birdsong through green shade, and guqin album covers print the character beside Wang Wei's couplet. Few say it aloud; everyone recognizes it in print.

Why this character belongs on skin

A grove of bamboo — the bamboo radical doubled into a thicket, tall culms leaning in wind, light falling through them in slatted green. The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove drank and argued and laughed beneath just such a canopy, refusing office, refusing pretense, three centuries before anyone thought to envy them. Bamboo itself is the Confucian virtue made plant: hollow, which is to say unguarded and humble, yet jointed and unbending, springing back from every load of snow, standing straighter for the weather it has survived. A grove is also privacy — the sound the wind makes in it is the sound of being alone and glad of it, a green room no one built. The old poets went into the 篁 to think clearly, because depth requires cover. Ink the thicket. Grow your own shade, and stand in it.