By Xiaofeng Yao
In recent years, the price of Gong Qi’s artwork has been moving steadily upwards, from 1,000 RMB per square chi when the master past away to 150,000-200,000 to the latest. It goes up for more than 15 times within eight years and tends to stay strong in the longer term. The big rises is among the utmost throughout the circle of modern and contemporary painting and calligraphy. In spite of that, most of the creations by Gong Qi are calligraphy works, they stands out in the field of modern calligraphy. The prevailing of Master Qi’s calligraphy has shown the public acknowledgment on his academic contribution, moral quality and calligraphic style, as well as the tendency to vulgarization in the buyers’ awareness of artwork in the market.
We all know that Master Gong Qi had been served in Beijing Normal University over a long period. Rather than a complete painter or calligrapher., he was a successful scholar who had to master the compulsory skill of calligraphy for scholars in that era. He wrote down the story about his experience of learning calligraphy in book “The Memories of Gong Qi” . It tells that he had been fond of painting in his youth. One day, his cousin asked for a painting from him but specifically warned him to leave the inscription to be done by his teacher instead of himself. That irritated Gong Qi and driven him to fight in calligraphy. He studied on writing techniques and character structures and tried to elicit different styles of regular scripts from the predecessors. Finally, he drew the conclusion of “5-8” rule for beautiful calligraphy, an equivalent to “golden ratio” theory in western literature and art. All of his hardworking has formed into the so-called Qi style calligraphy. There were disputes over his calligraphy from a few professionals when he was still living. For example, calligrapher Dakang described the lines in his calligraphy as rigid sticks. While Master Zhou Huang considered his writing style is resembled to the building of scaffolding. Perhaps these comments were purely witty banters, at least they revealed that Gong Qi’s work is not perfect by referring to his simple understanding or performance in calligraphy. Regarding to this issue, Gong Qi gave his answer when he was asked about the experience of practicing calligraphy, “I practice calligraphy in bigcharacter poster. It should be bigcharacter style.” That might be a modest claim for Gong Qi and a reflection of his experience to the fact.
As the carrier to Chinese calligraphy, Chinese character is subject to hieroglyphic category. In which it represents the theory that human is an integral part of nature and takes the inspiration from nature in defining the shape of each stroke, being in line with the writer’s comprehension of everything between the heaven and earth. Therefore, Weifuren appraised the work of sage Wang that the horizontal stroke is in the form of thunder clouds spreading for thousand miles, the dot a drop-stone falling from the peak, the vertical stroke a solid sere vine having been kept for thousands of years. Besides, Emperor Taizong remarked his calligraphy as “The attainment in dots and drags, the delicate structures and composition, being like the continuous cloud and mist or condensed dewdrops. They are seemingly separated but cohere to each other in the meaning, being like flying phoenix in the sky or coiling dragon admist the cloud. It creates an illusion of inclined look of the characters out of the upright placement.“ The learning of calligraphy is absolutely a long journey. It starts from the basic skills in “balanced horizontal stroke and straight vertical stroke”, then moves forward to the most expansive and refined realm to include everything in life, heaven and earth underneath a pen, until transforms one’s personalities into his calligraphy. The calligraphy of Gong Qi has reached a plateau in the performance of “balanced horizontal stroke and straight vertical stroke” but never surpassed the established styles of regular scripts developed by ancient calligraphers. In artistic realm, he is still far off from the title of “greatest calligrapher” to his ultimate. When it is concerned to calligraphy art, Gong Qi is less reputed comparing with renowned calligraphers in modern and contemporary society, like Ren You, Sanzhi Lin, Menghai Sha, Jiao Bai, Yingmo Shen, Ershi Gao, Xiaoshi Hu, Chusheng Lai, Xian Xiao. However, he takes the front place among modern calligraphers as most calligraphy artists are growing and adapting in the transition of old and modern art. After rounds of marketing hypes, the less accomplished creations have surprisingly brought their price to skyrocket and went far ahead renowned masters in market. The root cause for this phenomenon is the buyer. On one side, they may purchase the work for gift-giving. On the other side, part of the buyers still have a shallow concept about Chinese painting and calligraphy and buy the works for their title. They are doing investment and making money from the works regardless of the artistic value. In view of this, the expensive price and active demand of Gong Qi’s calligraphy works has reflected the tendency of vulgarization in art market.
The paper has no intention to belittle the achievement of Gong Qi’s calligraphy. It just tries to put a damper on the market, in the hope of getting the market back to value scale through rational analysis and leaving chances for more and more valuable artworks to be discovered, appreciated and carried forward to their greater brilliance.