Chinese Calligraphy: Zhang Daqian Artistic Influence

Chinese Calligraphy: Zhang Daqian Artistic Influence
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Chinese Calligraphy: Zhang Daqian Artistic Influence
Introduction
Zhang Daqian (1899 – 1983), also known as Chang Dai-Chien, is one of the world’s best-recognized artists from the Far East. He was born to a family in the Sichuan province in the tail-end years of the final dynasty in China’s history, the Qing. Zhang’s family was artistically inclined, leading to him being taught to paint by his mother and siblings from a young age. He naturally began by attempting to copy the pieces he could find lying around, like the individualistic masterpieces like Bada Shanren (Yinxing Liu, 2015). This paper seeks to identify the underlying influence of what came to be synonymous with the name Zhang Daqian through a critical chronological discussion of significant events in his life that determined his development into an accomplished visual artist. Similarly, this paper seeks to discuss my interest in the prolific artist, paying particular attention to his background and how he developed his style.
I chose Zhang Daqian as the topic of my essay because of his unique artistic journey that propelled him from a child born into an art-enthusiast family into an accomplished master who perfected and produced his technique after many year. This is because, while his life journey is long and illustrious, it goes to show that persistence and hard work in one’s craft can pay off.
Zhang Daqian is not only a painter of elaborate art but an artist whose creative journey lends tremendous insight into how one can master and perfect various skills through hard work and training. As a result, he is affiliated with both fine arts defined by detailed strokes and wild imagery consisting of splashed ink (Yinxing Liu, 2015). Even in his own words, an accomplished Zhang, late in his career, admitted that the underlying secrets and techniques behind his mastery provide a lot of context in understanding his paintings better.
In the year 2010, his paintings sold for the fourth-highest price at an art auction, falling short of Andy Warhol’s and Picasso’s pieces. In the following year 2011, he outpaced Picasso and was ranked as the best-selling painter in the world (Yinxing Liu, 2015). This, therefore, demonstrates his elite status as one of the most acclaimed Chinese painters in the modern art era. He similarly bears the label of being one of the most prolific master forgers in recent history. Zhang Daqian was vastly talented in the arts, having excelled at varying styles of paintings.
From a tender age, Zhang was urged by his family to pursue his passion for painting, marked by a particular turning point in 1917 (Clarke, 2011). His elder brother took him to Kyoto in Japan, where he began to study the process of dyeing textiles. A couple of years after that, he traveled to the capital, Shanghai, where he served as an understudy to two accomplished calligraphers of the time. During this period of instruction with his masters, he studied further works by previous masters in intricate detail in a bid to develop his style. Consequently, he copied aspects of previous works of art through making detailed forgeries which deceived ev...