In a recent post, Deconstructing the Chinese Character Creativity of Japan, I highlighted some creative work with Chinese characters by Japanese artists. What I didn’t say at the time was, “I wish the Chinese themselves would do more stuff like this.” Well, they are, and just recently I saw some great examples of it, first sent in by reader, and then later on Kaixin Wang (China’s Facebook).
I’m not going to deconstruct them like last time, because these are just way too complex. Just keep in mind that the squares and circles framing many of them are not actually a part of the characters like they were in the Japanese designs.
坏小孩
长命百岁
雄狮
美丽的姑娘
熊
蟹
唐僧
孙悟空
美丽的家乡
雄鹰翱翔
Unfortunately, I don’t know the original source of this art. If anyone could tell me, I’d be happy to properly attribute it.
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These are utterly fantastic! Let us know whenever you find out the source.
There’s a lot of this sort of thing in classical Arabic calligraphy. This may be more impressive given the need to keep more complex glyphs legible as opposed to something as simple as ک.
Oh, cool. Low-quality versions of these have been floating around on Sina Microblogs for a little while. I’ve never found the source, but I did find some other examples along the same lines.
There’s also a set of zodiac animals done by your artist.
And here’s a video lecture by a calligrapher who does really elaborate character combinations.
Wow, those character sets are amazing and so interesting to look at!
Thank you for posting!
Absolutely beautiful! This takes quite some creative stretching, but works so well. My favourite is 美丽的家乡
I also posted this up on http://socialmandarin.com
Have you seen these kanji transformers? http://www.bandai.co.jp/candy/products/2010/589514.html
These are way rad. If nothing else the artist(s) certainly has a future in logo design!
Do you have translations for these?
So Cool! I love them even tho i don’t understand all of the characters/sinographs/??? whatever you call them. (汉字）！