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Draw it Out

Published on by Zhi-Juan Guo

—how were Chinese Characters created? Part One

So the courteous Chinese man, after taking his bow, went on looking into himself. He looks at his hand, his face, his eye, his nose, his mouth, his ear, his body, his heart and even his eyebrow: he is determined to know himself: a human.

And to the best of his ability, he draws out the part of himself he sees and examines.

First the hand. How do you draw a hand? Everyone, in an idle minute, must have put their hand on a piece of paper and traced it. Indeed the very first pieces of arts we could trace are little hands imprinted on a rock:

Does not it look like so many humans, so many brave new people, in the very beginning of human race, in the most innocent and frank manner screaming out: I AM HERE! And ten thousand years later, we could still hear them!

The Chinese man looked at his hand and thought it’s a good idea to trace it too, only he did it in a slightly different manner:

And for a very long time, this image served as the symbol for the hand.

With time it evolves to:

Next he went to a clear river and looked at his own face. He came up with images like these:

Being an abstract artist, at first he draws an eye, puts a frame around it to mean the whole face.

With time, it evolves into this:

Does not this woman’s face intimate the character?

Or the face of this honest-looking, square-faced, big-eared man?

The Chinese man, after giving himself a good long look, went on looking up and down, right and left, till he draws out a picture for the sky, the sun, the moon, the tree, the fish, the ox…..indeed, he looks, he sees and he draws.

How many can you guess right? From left to right: moon, rain, mouth, ox, goat, wagon(car), boat, spring(water), melon.

So the Chinese man sticks to himself; so the Chinese man sticks to nature. There is no god in his thinking and there is no god in his drawing. There is, though, an infinite intimacy with the man himself, an infinite intimacy with all the things that are around him: nature, animals, all things living, all things he could see.

This is the character for sky. The Chinese man looks up and sees an enormous square, a roof above his head.

So we say the Chinese man has nature in his very blood and soul–there are thousands of poems and paintings to prove it. So we say there is a solid practicality in the craziest Chinese man: that man is part of nature; that man needs food; that food for every mouth means peace.