Fractal Analyses Reveal the Origin of Aesthetics in Chinese Calligraphy

Abstract

Chinese calligraphy is a thousand-year-old writing art. The question of how Chinese calligraphy artworks convey emotion has cast its spell over people for millennia. Calligraphers’ joys and sorrows were expressed in the complexity of the character strokes, style variations and general layouts. Determining how Chinese calligraphy aesthetic patterns emerged from the general layout of artworks is a challenging objective for researchers. Here we investigate the statistical fluctuation structure of Chinese calligraphy characters sizes using characters obtained from the calligraphy artwork “Preface to the Poems Collected from the Orchid Pavilion” which was praised as the best running script under heaven. We found that the character size distribution is a stretched exponential distribution. Moreover, the variations in the local correlation features in character size fluctuations can accurately reflect expressions of the calligrapher’s complex feelings. The fractal dimensions of character size fluctuations are close to the Fibonacci sequence. The Fibonacci number is first discovered in the Chinese calligraphy artworks, which inspires the aesthetics of Chinese calligraphy artworks and maybe also provides an approach to creating Chinese calligraphy artworks in multiple genres.

Keywords

• chinese calligraphy
• preface to the poems collected from the orchid pavilion
• fractal analysis
• fibonacci number
• aesthetics