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Recently, interview questions from the "Annual Chinese Calligraphy Exhibition" have gone viral online. Last year, the exam involved both traditional and simplified characters; this year, it focused on identifying misspellings. Previously, 114 candidates were announced as advancing to the interview stage, but only 101 actually appeared for the interview. This outcome is somewhat surprising. I took a look—the difficulty level of the questions isn't particularly high. These are problems that middle school students should be able to handle. Yet today, they have become the top priority for those who constantly write and practice calligraphy.
In the past, scholars were poets, poets were scholars; the two roles were inseparable. Writing and painting were merely “secondary pursuits” of literati. Throughout the history of calligraphy, the calligraphers truly revered by later generations were all exemplars of “artistic and literary excellence, dual mastery of craft and scholarship.” For a true scholar or poet, the issue of “misspellings” was never a problem.
In the era of fast-food civilization and the “scrolling frenzy,” reading books, newspapers, and trending topics has become the most commonplace state of cultural life. Many so-called calligraphers either never study or study inconsistently; writing misspellings is just an insignificant meal. Put bluntly, we’ve reached a point where “no misspellings, no literary style” seems to prevail. It’s not that mistakes are forbidden—but some calligraphers genuinely make errors. For instance, writing the character “云” in “子·石悦云” as “雲”; writing “侯” as “侯”; writing “鱼雨文哉” as “于一文哉”; even worse, writing Fan Zhongyan’s surname “范” as “範,” his family name “于” as “于,” and mistakenly writing “神州” as “九洲”—not to mention errors in style and structure. The pages are riddled with glaring, shocking blunders. In the face of such层出不穷 (endless) misspellings, can the calligraphy circle still credibly claim that “calligraphers’ works contain no misspellings”?