Mechanistic writing of Chinese characters
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The following mind-boggling demonstration of machine-like writing of Chinese characters was posted on imgur a few days ago:
My first reaction was that it would be impossible for a human being to write / print with such precision, especially since the characters are being produced with some sort of pen, whereas their strokes have the appearance of having been written with a brush. Here are some possible writing instruments for consideration:
yuánzhū bǐ 圓珠筆 ("ballpoint pen")
yuánzǐ bǐ 原子笔 ("atomic pen" — the old name for "ballpoint pen")
gǔnyuánzhū bǐ 辊圆珠笔 ("rollerball pen")
gāngbǐ 钢笔 ("ink pen" — still my favorite writing instrument for composing manuscripts, especially the Rotring Art Pen, but with a regular nib, not one of the calligraphic nibs)
zhānjiān bǐ 毡尖笔 ("felt-tip pen")
geru no pen ゲルのペン ("gel pen" — I think that's what they're called in Japanese; I don't know what they're called in Chinese)
I was also skeptical about the veracity of the presentation as actually being written by a person for the following additional reasons:
1. the somewhat odd way the ink appears on the paper and materializes / dries with little white dots scattered about in the black, but then quickly disappearing — this made me think that perhaps the writing is already chemically impregnated in the paper and that the pen simply applies water or appropriate solution to activate the writing (like secret writing with lemon juice we used to do as kids)
2. the jerky way the fingers reposition the paper for each successive character
3. the strange, rapid, jiggling motion of the pen in preparation for writing the next character, as though it were part of a machine that is aligning itself
4. because of #2 and #3, it makes me think that the video is speeded up a bit
There was quite a scandal earlier this year when it was discovered that some Chinese schoolchildren were using easily purchased robotic writing machines to do their drearily repetitious homework. See here and here, also this post: "Robotic copying" (2/22/19). In that post, I described Thomas Jefferson's ingenious copying machine called a "polygraph" that was produced in Philadelphia in 1806.
Even though I watched the imgur video (?) dozens of times, scrutinizing its every detail until I was mesmerized, I couldn't decide whether it was some sort of magic trick or whether it was the genuine record of flawless Chinese writing by a human being wielding a pen.
So I asked a couple dozen friends, colleagues, and students who are highly proficient in writing Chinese characters what their reaction to the demonstration was. Here are some of the replies I received:
1. I’d say it exemplifies good handwriting achievable with practice. The structure is flawless. Yet that’s just the first step, without which one can’t make further progress.
2. I would say this calligraphy lacks spirit and personal characteristics. As for regular script (kaiti 楷体) in Chinese calligraphy, Yan Zhenqing 颜真卿 (709-785) and Liu Gongquan 柳公权 (778-865) are the two most respected calligraphers. The former is famous for being dignified and composed, and the latter is famous for being powerful and vigorous. Here and here are examples of their calligraphy, where you can see that the writing, though correct and proper and without blemish, still is full of character. In contrast, while the "flawless writing" in the video definitely shows vigorous training, it resembles the typeface of a computer.
3. Even if a person writes such flawless characters, he/she will never surpass a printing machine. So why does a person invest time and energy in such a meaningless task, just to show that he/she can write as perfect as a machine? Or maybe it is the pride of a human that he/she can do something as perfect as a machine. What a paradox!
4. OMG! I can't believe those characters are written by a real human being rather than a machine!
5. I'm utterly stunned by this video in which there is a strong pursuit for order and beauty, two elements mostly at odds. I quite admire the order exhibited in the video, as it indeed brings a sense of beauty regarding to Chinese characters. I would encourage kids to learn to write in this way before they can develop their own style. Anyways, I was not told to learn to write these beautiful characters in my childhood, as my father thought writing to be useless. He indeed predicted the trend of typing, but I regretted for my not learning calligraphy.
6. I can't believe that this was written by a human being……
7. In my opinion, this kind of writing is very good, since the characters are clean, easy to read, and standard. These could be perfect samples for students to imitate to write with a pen. However, they are not perfect/flawless writing in the sense of Chinese calligraphy. For calligraphers, they lack personal style/spirit and look mechanistic.
8. I won't doubt the authenticity of this video since I used to have a middle school classmate who could do pretty much the same thing as this one. Although everyone (including herself) considered it as anti-human, all the teachers were extremely obsessed with her handwriting. Anyway, I think that makes sense because it is clear and easy to recognize, which provides the viewer convenience, especially in exams, it might even get you higher image points hahaha.
9. This writing is really perfect. And it is not unreal, I think, as I do believe there must be someone who can do it. Perhaps a calligraphy teacher would say this writing lacks “风格” [VHM: "style"], but if a child writes such beautiful characters, his/her elementary school teacher would definitely praise him/her. (If I were a child, I would hope my handwriting is like this.) Chinese teachers like to say the word “字如其人” [VHM: "written characters reflect the person"], so students are kind of pushed to practice their handwriting, in order to be like good students. That’s why I don’t doubt the real existence of this flawless writing.
10. Wow. From my own standpoint, I regard this writing as indeed dexterous, surreal, still-a-bit-away-from-perfection-but-already-super (well, structure-wise, some characters still have room for progress were we talking about "calligraphic standard"; e.g. the亅in 制 and 寸 in 射 should be longer on top (this flaw applies to all his 利刀旁), the 壽 under 籌 is slightly way too much to the left, and the 丿on the top of his 攵 in 政 is way too long, etc.).
To my own knowledge, my calligraphy teacher must highly praise the writer's dexterity. This would surely win the first prize in any calligraphic competition at the time when I was still a child and in adolescence (the 90s and 00s, even early 10s). I don't know about the standard now, but it should be consistent?
At last, should I use one word to describe this writing, I would call it 巧. 匠心 [VHM: "craftsmanship"] is for inventiveness and cannot be applied here. 周禮 says: "天有時，地有氣，材有美，工有巧". In the postface of 文心雕龍, Liu Xie alludes to 王孫巧心, in which Prof. Knechtges translated 巧 as "ingenuity". These two sentences, both containing 巧, are what this video instantly reminds me of.
The following comments are by non-native, but advanced, learners of Chinese:
1. Truly awe-inspiring.
2. I was hounded by Chinese teachers in HS for my handwriting being so bad — they threatened to call my English teachers to see if my English handwriting was as atrocious as well. I always found that to be a bit of a fallacy — writing in Chinese is different than English as you add a height dimension in addition to writing L to R when writing characters. Also, I felt I had more room to take “artistic liberties” with characters as they made the mistake of teaching us about calligraphy (although I am far from a calligrapher). As I am writing this, I’m sure my teacher would equate “artistic liberties” with “laziness."
After reading all of these comments on the writing in the video, and after watching a dozen more times, I still find it uncanny and almost unbelievable. However, all things considered, I'm willing to concede that a human being could be mechanized in this manner. One thing that finally convinced me is what the tenth commenter in the first section above pointed out about this robotic writer not being absolutely perfect after all. Indeed, I myself had even earlier begun to notice inconsistencies, for example, in the length and thickness of some of the inner horizontal strokes within the "boxes" of characters like 悬, 爆, 宣, 垣, 棍, and 射. So the writer, despite all of his / her anal obsessiveness, is prone to human imperfection in the end.
As a matter of fact, I know two very human individuals who are spectacular calligraphers whose works leave one breathless, without in the least succumbing to mechanistic lifelessness.
One is John Mullan, the work-study student in our department. From time to time, John leaves incredibly fine Arabic, Persian, and other calligraphy on the whiteboard in our seminar room. I stare at it with tremendous admiration, wondering how he could possibly create such elegant, graceful forms with those clumsy dry erase markers. And the next day he'll erase it and make another splendid creation.
The other natural calligrapher is Dan Heitkamp, who has done the artwork (usually woodcuts) for many of my books. Dan doesn't know Chinese, but he can accurately replicate whole poems and prose paragraphs written in Chinese. It's surprising that he doesn't make mistakes, even in the tiniest details, but what's most astonishing of all is that his Chinese characters have a distinctive style and flavor all their own: the mark of a true artist. Of the countless works of art that Dan has produced throughout his life — all without ever attending a college or academy — each has its own singular quality of being by Dan Heitkamp, done for his own love of imaginative design, made for himself, his family, and his close friends.
A final note. The imgur video generated a lot of comments. Nearly all of them are by people who don't have the foggiest clue about how the Chinese writing system works. I read through them all and found them to be tremendously revealing about the utter incomprehension of people who are outsiders to the script concerning how it works. Here we have bewilderment in its purest form. However, as I learn every time I teach "Language, Script, and Society in China", as I am this semester, even more stupefying is the lack of understanding of the nature of the script by the overwhelming majority of those who are insiders and use it for communicating every day. A mystery of mysteries.
[h.t. Tim Leonard; thanks to Qianshen Bai, Lin Zhang, Xiuyuan Mi, Tong Wang, Yijie Zhang, Qing Liao, Yuqing Yang, Leqi Yu, Rebecca Schleimer, Siyuan Yang, Chenfeng Wang, Nicholas Tursi, Buyun Chen, Yunzhu Huang, Tianyang Liu, and Diana S. Zhang]
Tim Leonard said,
September 14, 2019 @ 12:41 pm
You say you were skeptical because of the somewhat odd way the ink appears on the paper and materializes / dries with little white dots scattered about in the black, but then quickly disappearing. I think those are reflections that disappear as the ink either dries or is absorbed.
Stephen Hart said,
September 14, 2019 @ 1:07 pm
It might be interesting to have a forensic video analyst look at this.
Alyssa said,
September 14, 2019 @ 2:07 pm
I don't find this too unbelievable (though certainly impressive), given what I've seen of Western calligraphy. A practiced hand can be very precise and consistent. It's just rare to see Chinese characters written in such a way, because (as demonstrated by the responses quoted) that style isn't valued culturally as much as more "free" styles.
David Marjanović said,
September 14, 2019 @ 2:14 pm
I think it's real. The video is sped up, at least between the characters, where the writer repositions the paper to just the perfect position for the next character. The ink – well, this isn't a ball-point pen, this is some special kind of pen with a thin ink that doesn't dry immediately; when the pen is held down longer, more ink flows out, and a thicker stroke results, explaining why the strokes look so much as if they were drawn with a brush.
The writing shows an unbelievable amount of practice, but certainly not an impossible one. If I did nothing but eat, sleep, and try to imitate one particular printed font all day every day for a few months, I could probably write like this myself (assuming I didn't go insane first).
The absence of a personal artistic style is clearly intentional.
Julian Bradfield said,
September 14, 2019 @ 2:50 pm
I agree with Alyssa. Modern Western calligraphy often achieves very high standards of consistency, with the artistic component appearing in the design of the whole, rather than in variations of individual letter forms. (This contrasts with the early modern masters, such as Edward Johnston, whose letter forms are much less consistent than those of any modern professional.) Hanzi are more complex, but there's no reason they can't also be written with such consistency.
Frank L Chance said,
September 14, 2019 @ 3:05 pm
1) Gel Pen in Japanese is normally written ゲルペン"gerupen" actually an abbreviation of ゲルインキボールペン gel ink ball pen. You can see a selection of them here https://www.pilot.co.jp/products/pen/ballpen/gel_ink/ Note however that the "g" in the Japanese is hard, unlike the soft "g" of the English "gel."
2) NHK News included a segment today with elephants writing to encourage the victims of the recent typhoon. Sadly I do not know how to add an image (moving or otherwise) to the comments here but trust me the quality of the writing did not match that of the original post.
Sergey said,
September 14, 2019 @ 3:55 pm
I'd say that the pen is what I know as "capillary pen", looks like the proper name for it is "gel pen". Unlike the ballpoint pen, it doesn't have the ball at the writing tip, just a thin tube from which the paper pulls the ink by the capillary action. I think the ink in these pens is thinner than in the ballpoint pens, so it comes out wet, and varying the pressure on the pen (or probably more exactly, the distance between the tip and the paper) lets you vary the thickness of the line, as it changes the strength of the capillary action.
Philip Taylor said,
September 14, 2019 @ 4:03 pm
Looking at the only parts of the pen that one can see, I wonder whether it might be a Frixion Point Knock 04.
Not said,
September 14, 2019 @ 4:24 pm
To achieve this precision, the writer has to do some mindless copying of characters.
Does the text have some meaning (classic quotations or the lije) or is it just a showoff of the writers proficiency?
Jerry Friedman said,
September 14, 2019 @ 7:10 pm
Are those just sample characters, or does the text mean something?
Victor Mair said,
September 14, 2019 @ 11:44 pm
From Tim Leonard:
And here’s an equivalent in an alphabetic script.
https://i.imgur.com/p9A9qra.gifv
Victor Mair said,
September 14, 2019 @ 11:55 pm
From Hiroshi Kumamoto:
White on black:
https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1167093831147241472/pu/vid/720×1280/2MoY1CLxmUIa4V1H.mp4
Philip Taylor said,
September 15, 2019 @ 4:48 am
Not — "To achieve this precision, the writer has to do some mindless copying of characters" — Why do you say "mindless" ? I would expect that (for example) a student of Zen would regard the exercise as mindful in the extreme, thinking all the time of the angle of the pen, the pressure on the tip, the planning of the next part of the stroke, the timing of the breathing and so on. Just because we in the West would typically regard such an exercise as "mindless" does not mean that this belief is universal.
Victor Mair said,
September 15, 2019 @ 6:19 am
From Robert Harrist:
All I can say is I wish I could write like that! It's beautifully done, maybe a bit dry, as you suggest. I wonder what this person could do with brush and ink?
Victor Mair said,
September 15, 2019 @ 10:57 am
From a PRC M.A. student:
Thank you for sharing this with us. It really astonished me… He must have made a great effort to train himself to write as if he were printing. This could be considered as a special skill, but this kind of skill is probably contrary to the nature of calligraphy. When I was a child, I learned calligraphy for a few years. Like any art, calligraphy is an expression of personal temperament. Without space for expression, calligraphy loses its quality as an art category. Just as color matching and line scheduling in painting, wording and phrasing in literature, the tension between strokes of each character is the expressive power and aesthetic characteristics of calligraphy which varies greatly depending on the artist's temperament and mood. Training to write in printing style thoroughly cancels the room for the tension and thus turns calligraphy from an artistic genre into a mechanistic craft.
Victor Mair said,
September 15, 2019 @ 11:05 am
From another PRC M.A. student:
I think this is perfect but lacking spirit, since technology could do the same job. I didn’t have a calligraphy teacher before so I don’t know what the teacher might react. But if I were the teacher I would say he has a strong basis to learn calligraphy, because he knows how to write characters in a “standard” way (like 橫平竪直) and thus he could develop a more personal style of writing. Moreover, when I was in middle school, our teacher asked us to practice this way of writing (字帖 by 田英章) to get better grades in exam. We definitely do not write in such way since it costs too much time, but it does improve our writings, at least my writing.
By the way, I enjoy watching this kind of video. Watching people writing perfect or beautiful Chinese characters is very pleased.
Victor Mair said,
September 15, 2019 @ 11:08 am
From one more PRC M.A. student:
I think people could do this. But actually, some of the stroke sequences are incorrect. The person who writes these characters aims for writing the same as typing. It has its own value, but I think that it lacks spirit. I believe that a calligraphy teacher in China would not encourage such writing.
Ed M said,
September 15, 2019 @ 11:16 am
The preciseness of the writing reminds me of watching a sofer (Torah scribe) writing Hebrew. with every letter correctly placed, with cantillation and other marks applied to the letters. סוֹפְרִים strive for perfection.
Victor Mair said,
September 15, 2019 @ 7:33 pm
Yin Bingyong 尹斌庸, the authority on Hanyu Pinyin orthography, who knew Zhuang and Hawaiian, used to pride himself on being able to write Hanyu Pinyin with a pen in such a manner that it was indistinguishable from typeset text. He could do the same with Chinese characters and other scripts. His early training was as a mathematician, and he always maintained a precise, crystal-clear mind.
Don Clarke said,
September 18, 2019 @ 10:04 pm
Something weird is going on, as shown by the jerkiness of the video – not only between characters, but also during the writing of the characters. If this is really a person doing this, why don’t we have a straightforward, non-jerky video? I suspect there’s some illusion here.
CD said,
September 19, 2019 @ 12:18 pm
Are we sure that is a human hand on the right? The most obvious answer is a machine pen with enough rubber fingers attached to fill the edge of the screen. Then you add a real hand on the left to complete the illusion.
[VHM (11/23/19): From Siyuan Zhang:
About the writing machine, I found a relevant clip from CCTV news on YouTube. It can even imitate everyone's handwriting. To do that, you only need to follow the guidance on their app and write a few characters on your phone screen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDBiT9zBYOE
I also looked up the method for how it operates, which turns out to be not complex at all. It's called numerical control technology (数控技术), just like an excavator and other numerical control devices in factories that can follow programmed setting to operate in multiple dimensions. The pen head moves on the X-axis and Y-axis through control, so it can write or draw at will.]
acha said,
September 20, 2019 @ 3:53 am
Why not in English, too? 'Cherish your family', 'cherish your friends'. These sound ok to me.