P1: Perception of Art

One day I was talking to an art student and she told me, “art is all about perception.” That’s very true and direct. Art is communion of one soul to another, offered through a symbolic language of form and content.

According to the perennial philosophy (http://www.religiousworlds.com/text/prenphil.html), the human beings possess at least three modes of knowing: 

• The eye of flesh
• The eye of mind
• The eye of contemplation

The eye of flesh discloses the material, concrete, and sensual world; the eye of mind discloses the symbolic, conceptual, and linguistic world; and the eye of contemplation discloses the spiritual, transcendental, and transpersonal world. These are not three different worlds, but three different aspects of our one world disclosed by different modes of perception.

Cursive script emerged in the early years of the Han dynasty as a result of its convenience in writing. Its basic characteristics can be summed up as: an impression of vigorous and unrestrained spirit is revealed in the rhythmic and fast movement of brushes.

There are three phases of the development of cursive script - early cursive script, Zhang style cursive script, and modern cursive script. Early cursive script paralleled in development with official script and was generally called "official cursive script", which had some elements of seal-cursive script. Zhang style cursive script was a blend of early cursive with Han official script, with strokes hooked together in forms of waves, each character standing independently from another, flat and square and moving horizontally.