Sui Dynasty

Zhiyong's Thousand Character Classic in Regular and Cursive Scripts

Zhiyong's Thousand Character Classic in Regular and Cursive Scripts has ten characters per line and 202 lines in total. Zhiyong was a seventh-generation descendant of Wang Xizhi. He is said to have practiced calligraphy behind closed doors for thirty years, writing more than eight hundred copies of the Thousand Character Classic and distributing them to temples in Zhejiang. This work presents regular script and cursive script side by side, achieving an organic combination of the two. Its regular script strengthens elements of freedom and liveliness within stability and rigor, while its cursive script, like regular script, uses slightly flattened and angled brushwork. It does not connect strokes arbitrarily, but often breaks within continuity and keeps the outer shapes of the characters relatively balanced, creating varied postures of the unusual and the upright. The regular script can be seen as the embryo of cursive script, while the cursive script is the refinement of regular script, giving the work a stable, spacious, open, and elegant aesthetic quality.