Luo Songsong

    songsongluo@126.com

    ENTERING the studio of Guan Baichun, an oil painting of a man moving along a river with a bag of cobblestones over his shoulder doesn’t seem to fit in the small space filled with wooden furniture and grotesque stones on shelves.

    The man in the painting is Guan. The river is the place where he first began practicing calligraphy on stones. The bag is the spiritual “food” that inspired and helped him rise to fame as the founder of a new artistic field known as mini-calligraphy on rare stones.

    Even though the handwriting is so small that it can’t be appreciated by the naked eye, beautiful script combined with a unique stone ingeniously makes you feel that each shines more brightly in the other’s company, looking as if they were made for each other.

    Stone inherits culture

    When the whole country faced serious material shortages in the late 1960s and 1970s, a teenage Guan found himself addicted to Chinese poems, calligraphy and history. It was then that he realized stones could serve as a cheap and accessible medium of writing.

    To inscribe a long enough text on one stone, he researched miniature calligraphy and came to realize the essence of art is the harmonious combination of natural objects and human minds.

    Before the invention of paper, Chinese language was an integral part of nature, mostly inscribed on animal bones, tortoise shells, bronze vessels, bamboo slips, silks and stones, which embodied greater vitality than traditional paper-writing.

    “The tiny script on the various mediums appears vigorous and stirring, but it has to be consistent with the surface,” said Guan.

    However, not all stones can be used as writing material for mini-calligraphy, and a fine stone cannot be written on casually. Thus, Guan visited famous mountains and great rivers to find unique stones with his artistic eye.

    In the late 1980s, he attended a seminar on the culture and history of the Xibe ethic minority group where he came from, and decided to inscribe a glorious memory to honor their ancestors who migrated to defend the frontiers from the northeast to the far west 250 years ago.

    To obtain a deeper understanding of the history, Guan spent eight years intermittently covering a distance of 8,000 kilometers from Heilongjiang to Xinjiang in the 1990s and collected over 2,000 rare stones along the route for his art.

    “I didn’t feel lonely or scared during the journey because the stones were the best companions,” he said.

    After he returned, he devoted himself to his masterpiece of 56 rare stones he carefully selected from the collection, representing the 56 ethnic groups in China, as a gift for the 50th anniversary of the founding of The People’s Republic of China in 1999.

    It was a hard time for his family because he quit his job, and his wife had to sing at night to support the education of their son, whose first name 磊 (consisting of three stones) was selected by Guan before his birth.

    While he was crazy about the work, a Japanese collector offered him a high price to inscribe the whole book of “The Story of the Stone,” also known as “Dream of the Red Chamber.” However, he turned it down and threw himself into his masterpiece for six months.

    As a result, the 56 rare stones inscribed with over 40,000 words were displayed in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing before the anniversary, and was kept in the Chinese National Museum of Ethnology.

    Guan’s other large-scale mini-writings, such as “Three Hundred Poems of the Tang Dynasty,” are also highly praised by experts and celebrities at home and abroad. His next big plan is to write for all the Chinese ethic groups.

    Stone understands soul

    Fine mini-calligraphy demands a lot in terms of the temperature, the humidity, the brightness, the brush and the quality of the stones, but, more profoundly, it demands the concentration and inspiration of a calligrapher.

    In general, Guan might study a stone for several days or even years trying to figure out its story. In this way, he understands the stone completely when he starts to write one of his masterpieces.

    As a result, thousands of stones of different sizes wait for their turn to become art. His collection, full of these little nature spirits, range from jagged stones in frightful shapes, sparkling crystals, sleek jade-like stones, to beautiful veined stones.

    When inspiration comes, he will choose the right time, make sure all the conditions are just right, sit quietly with his eyes closed but his mind’s eye open before completing the writing in one sitting without a break.

    “What I am doing is making a speechless stone fresh and alive,” said Guan, who can associate any stone in his studio with Chinese historical events and literature according to his deep understanding.

    He remembered when an 80-year-old music conductor from America was enormously impressed by his exquisite work and asked Guan to make one for his wife as a gift when he went home.

    After Guan wrote a romantic poem entitled “Endless Yearning” on a rare stone the musician selected, he explained the implied meaning to the conductor. Guan was surprised when the man knelt down and wept in front of the stone.

    “People who can understand the stones can understand me,” said Guan, who was invited as the most distinguished guest to the concert conducted by the senior musician that night and started their international friendship.

    Stone rolls on

    Although he has made some remarkable achievements on the road of life he has walked, he keeps a certain distance from society and focuses on the stones he deems sacred and meaningful.

    For the moment, Guan is thinking of blending his art with the urban development and changes in Shenzhen where he has been living for more than 10 years. He will stick to his work, echoing the title of the painting that hangs in his small studio, “On the Way.”

    “The work and collection reflect his achievement and persistent pursuit of art, which deserves respect and admiration,” said Ruan Cishan, top commentator from Hong Kong Phoenix Satellite TV.

“What I am doing is making a speechless stone fresh and alive.”

— Guan Baichun, the founder of a new artistic field known as mini-calligraphy on rare stones, who can associate any stone in his studio with Chinese historical events and literature according to his deep understanding