文徵明（1470-1559），原名壁，字征明。四十二岁起以字行，更字征仲。因先世衡山人，故号衡山居士，世称“文衡山”，明代画家、书法家、文学家。汉族，长州（今江苏苏州）人。生于明宪宗成化六年，卒于明世宗嘉靖三十八年，年九十岁，曾官翰林待诏。诗宗白居易、苏轼，文受业于吴宽，学书于李应祯，学画于沈周。在诗文上，与祝允明、唐寅、徐真卿并称“吴中四才子”。在画史上与沈周、唐寅、仇英合称“吴门四家”。

文徵明于书法则是博飞专精的典范。文徵明的小楷造诣最高。主要师法传为王羲之的《黄庭经》、《乐毅论》以及钟繇《宣示》，王献之《十三行》等，又能融入唐人小楷笔法于一炉，形成“温纯精绝”的自家风貌。

文徵明的行书大致可分两大类风格：一是以王羲之《圣教序》笔意为主所写的行书小品；一是以黄山谷笔意书写的大行楷。

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.

Laozi is the name of a legendary Daoist philosopher, the alternate title of the early Chinese text better known in the West as the Daodejing, and the moniker of a deity in the pantheon of organized “religious Daoism” that arose during the later Han dynasty (25-220 CE). Laozi is the pinyin Romanization for the Chinese characters which mean “Old Master.” Laozi is also known as Lao Tan (“Old Tan”) in early Chinese sources (see Romanization systems for Chinese terms).

China may have no intentions of using its growing military might, but that is of little comfort for Western countries. From the World Trade Organization to the United Nations, Beijing is happy to use its soft power to get what it wants -- and it is wrong-footing the West at every turn.

Former Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen once told me, half with amusement and half with resignation, that military people around the world are all more or less the same. "They can only be happy when they have the most up-to-date toys," he said.

There's no single set of criteria for calligraphy - in particular, clearly the hiragana of Heian times is working on a very different basis from the Zen calligraphy of later centuries. Nonetheless, there is some commonality. Such considerations as balance, linework and composition always apply, in some way or other. Calligraphy should be done without hesitation, with speed and confidence, but never easily - one book claims "It is said of one master that he would never accept the work of any pupil who did not get drenched with sweat through the spiritual exertion of writing."