Creative Chinese Character Art

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
Creative Chinese Character Art

长命百岁
Creative Chinese Character Art

雄狮
Creative Chinese Character Art

美丽的姑娘
Creative Chinese Character Art


Creative Chinese Character Art


Creative Chinese Character Art

唐僧
Creative Chinese Character Art

孙悟空
Creative Chinese Character Art

美丽的家乡
Creative Chinese Character Art

雄鹰翱翔
Creative Chinese Character Art

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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John Pasden

John is a Shanghai-based linguist and entrepreneur, founder of AllSet Learning.

Comments

  1. David Moser Says: May 27, 2010 at 1:51 pm

    These are utterly fantastic! Let us know whenever you find out the source.

  2. 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.

  3. jdmartinsen Says: May 27, 2010 at 3:16 pm

    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.

  4. Wow, those character sets are amazing and so interesting to look at!

    Thank you for posting!

  5. 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

  6. Have you seen these kanji transformers? http://www.bandai.co.jp/candy/products/2010/589514.html

  7. These are way rad. If nothing else the artist(s) certainly has a future in logo design! 🙂

  8. Do you have translations for these?

  9. So Cool! I love them even tho i don’t understand all of the characters/sinographs/??? whatever you call them. (汉字)!

  10. […] Chinese Character Art Image by sinosplice See this blog post for more […]

  11. This character art is created by young Chinese girl NOT Japanese!

  12. The young Chinese artist name: 竺仁岑. If you google her name you would be able to find out all kinds of her character art in different categories like birds, animal, … However, most of art is in Chinese.

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