Zhang Xu

Zhang Xu the Chinese calligrapher of the Tang dynasty (flourished in the eighth century, c. 675-750) who is celebrated as the greatest master of wild cursive script and who was said to write only when drunk. He was called Crazy Zhang, and his ecstatic brushwork, apparently improvised yet perfectly controlled, deeply influenced later calligraphy and even the poetry of his age.

Life and Reputation

Zhang Xu was born around 675, probably in the region of Suzhou in the lower Yangtze valley, and lived through the first half of the eighth century under the reign of the emperor Xuanzong. He held a modest official post as a county official and later as a minor officer in the capital, but it was not his service in the bureaucracy that made his name. His reputation rested entirely on his extraordinary gift for the brush.

He was a contemporary and friend of the great poets Li Bai and He Zhizhang, and he moved in the brilliant literary circle of the Tang high court. Legend describes him as a man of eccentric habits who loved wine, and who would write with his hair as a brush when the mood took him. He was dubbed Zhang Dian, or Crazy Zhang, a name that has clung to him ever since.

Stories tell of his writing on walls and screens in moments of inspiration, of his cries, his dancing and his gestures as he worked, and of the astonishment of the spectators who watched him. Yet behind the apparent frenzy lay years of constant practice, for all accounts agree that his cursive script was the product of deliberate and patient study rather than of accident.

The Art of Cursive Script

The cursive script, or caoshu, is the most rapid and abbreviated of the Chinese writing styles, in which strokes are linked and many elements of a character are simplified or omitted. In its wild form, known as kuangcao, the movement is so free that the characters seem to flow into one another and to follow the impulse of the writer rather than any fixed pattern. Zhang Xu carried this style to a height rarely equalled.

What distinguished him was his ability to remain in control even at his most abandoned. His lines swell and thin, twist and turn, and yet the structure of each character, however transformed, is not lost. Calligraphers have long studied his surviving work for its mastery of the continuous line, in which a single unbroken movement of the brush can be read as a record of the energy that produced it.

He was said to have learned from watching the movements of a sword dancer and from the flight of birds, transferring the rhythms of the world around him into the movement of his brush. This idea that calligraphy could absorb the dynamics of dance and nature became a central theme of Chinese aesthetic theory, and Zhang Xu is one of its chief examples. His art suggested that writing could be a form of performance.

Master Works and Transmission

Very little of Zhang Xu's work survives in original form, and much of what is known comes from copies, rubbings and descriptions written by later admirers. Among the pieces attributed to him, the most frequently cited is a manuscript of four ancient poems, whose fluid and interwoven lines are taken as the best surviving witness to his style. Its characters move with a freedom that later calligraphers found both exhilarating and daunting.

Steles and notices said to carry his brush were highly prized, and emperors and collectors sought them out for centuries. The scarcity of authentic works has made his reputation depend in part on the testimony of witnesses, who described his writing with awe. Later critics compared his cursive script to a storm, to a rushing stream, and to the flight of startled birds.

His influence can be traced in the work of the monks Huaisu and later of Yan Zhenqing, who is said to have learned from him the secret of movement in writing. Passages of Tang and Song literature record his sayings on technique, and though their authenticity is sometimes doubted, they preserve a picture of an artist whose genius was recognised in his own lifetime and whose fame only grew after his death.

Poetry and the Cultural Circle

Zhang Xu was himself a poet as well as a calligrapher, and a few of his verses survive in the great anthologies of Tang poetry. He belonged to a celebrated group of men of talent whom the age revered for their drinking and their art, and his friendship with Li Bai and He Zhizhang places him at the heart of the most brilliant poetic circle of the period. The association of wine, poetry and calligraphy became almost proverbial in accounts of his life.

The poet Du Fu, writing a generation later, included him among the famous masters of the age in a poem describing the great artists of the Tang, and the memory of his wild writing entered the common imagination. Painters and poets returned to the image of Crazy Zhang long after his death, and he became a symbol of inspired spontaneity in the service of a disciplined art.

His reputation thus rests on a double foundation: the surviving traces of his brush, however few, and the vivid stories of his manner that were told and retold across the centuries. Together they made him the archetype of the untamed genius, a figure who seemed to prove that the highest art could combine seeming chaos with absolute mastery.

Influence and Legacy

Zhang Xu stands at the head of the tradition of wild cursive writing that flourished in the Tang and later dynasties. Huaisu, the monk calligrapher of the following generation, is often paired with him, and the two together set the standard against which all later cursive masters were judged. His presence is felt in the work of every calligrapher who sought freedom of movement and a personal, expressive line.

Later art theory used him as a test case for the relation between inspiration and technique. Critics asked whether his wildness was the product of intoxication or of long training, and concluded that his apparent abandon rested on a foundation of complete control. The debate over his work helped to shape the understanding that the greatest freedom in art is the freedom of the master, not of the beginner.

He remains one of the most admired and least imitated figures in the history of Chinese calligraphy. His surviving pieces are treasured, his sayings are repeated, and the image of the drunken calligrapher dashing off his lines still stands for the union of discipline and spontaneity. Few artists have left so few works and so large a legend, and few have so deeply shaped the way East Asia pictures the inspired hand.

See also

• Huaisu
• Cursive script
• Yan Zhenqing
• He Zhizhang