Chiang Yee’s Chinese Calligraphy: An Introduction to Its Aesthetic and Technique remains the classic introduction to Chinese calligraphy. In eleven richly illustrated chapters, Chiang explores the aesthetics and the technique of this art in which rhythm, line, and structure are perfectly embodied. He measures the slow change from pictograph to stroke to the style and shape of written characters by the great calligraphers.

In addition to aesthetic considerations, the text deals with more practical subjects such as the origin and construction of the Chinese characters, styles, technique, strokes, composition, training, and the relations between calligraphy and other forms of Chinese art.

Chinese Calligraphy is a superb appreciation of beauty in the movement of strokes and in the patterns of structure—and an inspiration to amateurs as well as professionals interested in the decorative arts.

For 1,300 years, Chinese calligraphy was based on the elegant art of Wang Xizhi (A.D. 303–361). But the seventeenth-century emergence of a style modeled on the rough, broken epigraphs of ancient bronzes and stone artifacts brought a revolution in calligraphic taste. By the eighteenth century, this led to the formation of the stele school of calligraphy, which continues to shape Chinese calligraphy today.

A dominant force in this school was the eminent calligrapher and art theorist Fu Shan (1607–1685). Because his work spans the late Ming–early Qing divide, it is an ideal prism through which to view the transformation in calligraphy.

Rather than seek a single explanation for the change in calligraphic taste, the author demonstrates and analyzes the heterogeneity of the cultural, social, and political processes behind it. Among other subjects, the book covers the late Ming interaction between high and low culture; the role of publishing; the Ming loyalist response to the Qing; and early Qing changes in intellectual discourse. In addition to the usual approach of art historians, it adopts the theoretical perspectives of such fields as material culture, print culture, and social and intellectual history.