Fractal Calligraphy in Mathematical Art History
数理美术史中的分形书法
Three approaches to create fractal calligraphy
By Prof. Wen Xing
6:00-7:00 PM, 4/6/2017
House Center B, 2nd Floor
Dartmouth College
Dinner provided.
Registration Required.
Email: Wen.Xing@Dartmouth.EDU
Published three books on Chinese calligraphy and painting last year, i.e., Hiding the Tip: Gateway to Chinese Calligraphy, Ink Bamboo in Chinese Poetry and Painting, and Dao, Neo-Confucian Principle, and Chan Buddhism in Chinese Calligraphy and Painting (Winner of the second China Fine Arts Award), Professor Wen Xing, Chair Professor and Director of DIC at Dartmouth, just published two new books on Chinese Manuscript Culture this year, An Explorative Study of the Chu Bamboo-Slip Calligraphy: The Calligraphy of the Xinian Curated by Tsinghua University, A Perspective of Chinese Manuscript Culture
and Orchid Pavilion in Chinese Manuscript Culture.
The study of Chinese Manuscript Culture and The Dartmouth Institute for Calligraphy and Manuscript Culture in China (DIC) were covered by Chinese Social Sciences Today (CSST), the prominent newspaper in social sciences and humanities in China. Proposed by Prof. Wen Xing as both a particular approach and an academic field, Chinese Manuscript Culture has been an effective way of experiential learning of traditional Chinese culture at Dartmouth, according to the CSST interview on page 3, 23 October 2015.
Established in 1979, Social Sciences in China Press (SSCP) has been the leading publisher in social sciences and humanities in China. It is the publisher who publishes China’s most prominent academic journals, such as the Chinese and the English editions of Social Sciences in China. The silk painting below was a gift from Prof. Wang Limin, the Executive Deputy Editor-in-Chief of SSCP, when he visited Dartmouth’s calligraphy and manuscript culture institute in October.
During his October visit to Dartmouth, Professor Lin Zhongjun of Shandong University presented us with his excellent calligraphy work, jie jing jing wei 洁净精微: 
As a leading expert of the study of the Book of Changes, Professor Lin’s calligraphy well illustrates his cosmological understanding of Chinese calligraphy.
Led by Professor Lin Zhongjun, Deputy Director of China’s National Center for the Study of the Book of Changes and Ancient Chinese Philosophy at Shandong University, three leading scholars of the Book of Changes will discuss the “First of All Chinese Classics”, the Book of Changes (I Ching), from the perspective of bamboo and silk manuscript culture.
On Monday, 24 August 2015, Prof. Wen Xing was invited to deliver a lecture on Chinese Manuscript Culture in the conference room (12F) of the China Social Sciences Press of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, “The Methodological Significance of Chinese Manuscript Culture.”
As Prof. Xing presented, from a postmethod perspective, what Chinese Manuscript Culture brought us exceeded traditional research subjects, materials and methodologies thus opened up a new field of study in traditional Chinese calligraphy and manuscripts.
Xing argued that the future of the humanities would be largely decided by how we reflected and exceeded the traditional concepts and theories of natural sciences.
Since the latest quantum cosmology almost simply repeated what Buddhists, Daoists and Confucians had proposed for cosmology thousands of years ago, it is inevitable to reconsider the scholarly and religious traditions as well as the latest scientific discoveries and theories from the perspective of the humanities in the East, as Xing argued. This is one perspective from which we see the methodological significance of Chinese Manuscript Culture.
