Yang Xiupin: Eighty Years of Writing Calligraphy as Himself

Yang Xiupin: Eighty Years of Writing Calligraphy as Himself

On an autumn day in 2023, as sunlight fell in pieces through the trees by Dianchi Lake in Kunming, I knocked on the door of the calligrapher Yang Xiupin. He opened it himself: medium height, plainly dressed, slight of frame, with a serene face and bright eyes — nothing suggested eighty years. We sat down in his study and talked for more than three hours.

Ten Characters Before Dinner

Born in 1943 into a comfortable family, Yang began learning characters at four. His father’s rule was strict: ten characters written before each meal. “I memorized them fast and ran off happily to play,” he recalls, still delighted. At five he read newspapers on his own; at seven he was writing the signs his neighbors needed, to general admiration. School only deepened the pleasure — he never once skipped class, a small regret he later turned into a 1998 newspaper essay, *Playing Truant*.

*Calligraphy couplet — 126 × 68 cm*

“Read Earnestly; Be a Good Person”

“For me, there was no striving for calligraphy — it was simply one of the things I studied,” Yang says. At sixteen he met Li Guangping, great-grandson of Li Hongzhang and grandnephew of Li Jingxi, the last governor-general of Yunnan and Guizhou. Li had headed Yenching University’s history department in his early twenties and served on the Palace Museum’s appraisal committee before coming to teach in Yunnan. To learn knowledge and thinking from him, Yang says, divided his life in two. Asked what he took most from those years, he answers in eight characters: “Read earnestly; be a good person.”

*Collected verses in praise of China’s great rivers and mountains — 126 × 68 cm*

*Collected verses celebrating China’s beautiful landscape — 126 × 68 cm*

The 1979 Breakthrough

Even in the hardest years Yang never stopped practicing — copying models, meditating on them, turning problems over. The quiet accumulation erupted in 1979 at China’s first national calligraphy competition: tens of thousands of works arrived, one hundred were exhibited, and the top prize went to Yang’s clerical script. It shook Yunnan and drew national attention.

*Listen Quietly as the Mountain Breathes; Do Not Wake the Sleeping Clouds — 126 × 68 cm*

Writing Myself

Yang is both practitioner and thinker. “Writing calligraphy is writing myself,” he says. He lives by the Analects line that delight beats love, and love beats mere knowing — only love carries a practice deep. Learn with a quiet heart and real feeling, he advises; then throw it all away without regret. What remains, internalized, is the ever-deepening “I,” so that “my hand writes my heart.” Almost everything he writes is his own text — he rarely copies the words of others — and his style runs deep, weighty, and grand.

*Scholarship as Soul, Character Naturally Pure — 126 × 68 cm*

Love Is Beauty

“Love is beauty” is his central idea, drawn from decades of teaching aesthetics and philosophy at university before retirement. “Different people love differently, and each love has its own beauty. Standards change, but love is eternal, and so is beauty.” Beauty, he notes, varies by era, region, nation, and degree. His whole career in calligraphy enacts the thought: love, not fashion, is what makes a style.

*Calligraphy couplet — 126 × 68 cm*

Enjoyment, Not Struggle

“I rarely put brush to paper. Calligraphy is my enjoyment, not my struggle,” he says, seven decades on from those first strokes. For him, learning, cultivation, and breadth of heart are calligraphy’s three essentials — “a person who knows only calligraphy cannot master calligraphy.” So he reads into painting, music, and poetry, widening the experience behind the brush.

*Watching Snow on the Alps, Listening to Waves on the Baltic — 126 × 68 cm*

As our talk ended and the sun leaned toward the Western Hills, I left grateful. Few conversations reach the soul; this one did — explained, perhaps, by his own advice: “After learning, throw it all away and return to yourself.”

If you would like to appreciate or commission calligraphy by Yang Xiupin, Badou Art’s advisers are glad to help.

Source: https://www.badouart.com/25555.html