The Art of Calligraphy in Modern China is a well-illustrated and handsomely produced volume that presents itself as a survey of the development and transformation of the Chinese calligraphic tradition in the modern era (defined here as the roughly fifty-year period from the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 to the end of the century). Despite its grand ambitions, however, the book turns out, upon closer inspection, to be something far more limited: namely, a catalogue published to accompany an exhibition entitled Brushes with Surprise: The Art of Calligraphy in Modern China, held at the British Museum in London in 2002. This criticism is not meant to denigrate the exhibition catalogue as a genre, but merely to point out that no single exhibition could possibly do justice to such a sprawling topic. This book, in other words, is not quite the all-encompassing synthetic consideration suggested by its title, even given its self-imposed boundaries of time (defining “modern” as beginning in 1949) and space (only calligraphers from mainland China are included).

The catalogue’s author, Gordon Barrass, is an international businessman and former diplomat who served in the British Embassy in Beijing for several years in the early 1970s. Moreover, almost all of the works in the show were collected by him and donated to the British Museum, the chief exception being those pieces given by artists who were “persuaded” by Barrass (as we are told in the foreword by the museum’s chairman of the trustees) to donate them to the museum. I must confess here that such motivated endeavors make me somewhat queasy, inasmuch as the complex relationships among an institution, a major donor, and practicing artists (just what sorts of “persuasion” were used to get them to release their work to the museum?) raise a number of thorny ethical issues that cannot but affect the outcome of a project such as this.

For the benefit of the general reader, the book begins with a brief overview of the historical development of calligraphy and then examines the broad political context that played such an important role in the modern evolution of the tradition. The remainder of the volume comprises biographically structured discussions of twenty-five artists, a half-dozen of whom represent the “grand tradition” (left undefined), while the others are categorized as classicist, modernist, neoclassicist, or avant-garde. Although many of the figures Barrass treats would likely appear in any comparable survey of modern calligraphy, exactly how he arrived at this particular list of twenty-five is never fully justified or explained. Further mystery results from the fact that The Art of Calligraphy lacks a proper checklist of the exhibition it accompanied, so that it is at times unclear whether an illustrated work appears simply to make a point or as a record of its inclusion in the show.

A brief look at the categories Barrass uses as the organizing principle for the core of his study reveals some of the fault lines that riddle the whole book. Classicist calligraphers are defined as believing that “the styles of calligraphy developed in the past provide a rich array of themes on which the talented can perform endless variations” (25), while the modernists, by contrast, “believed that calligraphy would never become a means of creative expression in modern China unless it broke free from the rigorous rules that had constrained it for centuries” (29). The neoclassicists, Barrass explains, reacted to the demise of classical calligraphy, brought about by modernization, by echoing the sentiment of the seventeenth-century painter Shi Tao, who said that “ink should follow the times” (34). And finally, there are the avant-garde artists whose aim “is to explore new frontiers for their art” (36).

The problems with this schematization are several. First, these four categories do not correspond to any analytical framework deployed in Chinese art criticism and thus seem rather arbitrarily superimposed upon the material. Furthermore, terms such as “modernist” and “neoclassical” come heavily freighted for most Western readers and do little to elucidate the pertinent art-historical context that might help them to grasp better the specific issues relevant to understanding Chinese calligraphy. Most egregious, however, is that these terms are so vague that they become nearly meaningless, a problem exacerbated by the fact that the reader is largely left to deduce from Barrass’s discussions those aspects of a given calligrapher’s art that lie behind its characterization as, say, “neoclassical,” since the author rarely makes any such connections explicit. In the end, moreover, artists in each category are described in one way or another as hewing to tradition while striving to make something new (see, for instance, pp. 135, 161, 176, 192, 197, 206, 229, 249), suggesting that the whole apparatus is essentially a case of distinctions without difference.

Apart from these conceptual vagaries imbedded in the book’s structure, the biographical approach that Barrass adopts is of limited value, repeatedly drawing questionable connections between personality traits and artistic expression. For instance, shortly after we read that Lin Sanzhi was known for his “rustic simplicity” (141), his brushwork is described as raw and naïve, “taut with energy reflecting the inner strength of a man who had survived only as a result of his iron determination” (142). Similarly, the “tense, almost angry, strokes” of Huang Miaozi “reflect the indignation of a man wronged [while] … the strength of the characters and the sureness with which they are placed on the paper convey the conviction of a man confident that justice and history are on his side” (175). While such projection does, perhaps, echo the traditional Chinese aesthetic desideratum of “seeing the person in the work,” a little of this goes a long way in a work that presumably aspires to something greater than the transmission of hagiographic platitudes.

On the positive side, in addition to its many high-quality illustrations, The Art of Calligraphy also provides an extensive bibliography of publications in Chinese and an appendix with transcriptions of each calligraphic work in the book (the latter is especially welcome). While such features will clearly appeal to scholars, that same readership will likely be appalled by the absence of a single cited source. Frankly, the august University of California Press should be ashamed of publishing a work masquerading as history and criticism that is perfectly devoid of documentation for any and all of its claims and assertions.

If I seem somewhat harsh in my assessment of this project, it is in part a lament of squandered opportunity, of so much effort expended so ineffectively. As a model of what this book could have been, we might look to the recently published Brushing the Past: Later Chinese Calligraphy from the Gift of Robert Hatfield Ellsworth (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2000). Like The Art of Calligraphy, Brushing the Past is also a catalogue of an exhibition of a donated private collection of calligraphy; however, the similarities end there, as the Freer Gallery made the wise decision of having the collector write a brief preface while engaging a team of respected scholars (Thomas Lawton, Joseph Chang, and Stephen D. Allee) to write the catalogue entries and a pair of essays. Although far more modest in scope (only 142 pages), Brushing the Past is a catalogue that both memorializes the gift of a generous collector and places that gift in a broad and well-documented art-historical context. It is, in short, far from a mere exercise in flattery or donor cultivation and, as such, presents an approach that the British Museum (or any museum, for that matter) may wish to consider the next time it finds itself confronting the maw of the proverbial gift-horse.