HELLO from KOREA

Calligraphy:
The Art of the Scholar
Writing things down with pen or pencil
on paper as we do everyday usually
requires little effort or thought. Most of
us do not worry about our handwriting
or how it looks, as long as it is readable.
Even calligraphers who write in
Romance, Germanic, or Slavic language,
do not have to face all the iron discipline,
nor do they have the dazzling freedom
offered by the art of calligraphy in
Korea.
Traditionally, the characters used in
calligraphy in Korea as well as in Japan
has been Chinese, the only written language
of East Asia for thousands of
years. Even after the invention of the Korean alphabet hangeul in 1446,
Chinese continued to be used as the written language of the official
sphere until the late 19 th century. Because Chinese is written with tens of
thousands of characters, each with a different arrangement, number of
strokes, and meaning, learning how to read and write these characters is
no small task. Chinese calligraphy was introduced to Korea about 1,500
years ago.
To do brush-writing, or butgeulssi, as it is called in Korean, the Four
Friends of the Scholar are needed. They are ink, an ink stone, a brush,
and paper, all of the finest quality possible. The ink is made of carbon
mixed with glue and fragrance which are formed into very hard, dense,
black blocks. The ink stone was made of stone, usually blue stone, of just
the right hardness and with a smooth sloping surface in the depression
that holds water at the deep end.
Most important in butgeulssi is the balance of spacing and the proportions
of the characters, spontaneously executed with no retouching. This
43 _ Culture