Calligraphy Ni Zan

Yuan dynasty is the first minority regime in Chinese history. Due to the government’s ethnic discrimination policy, Han scholars were unequally treated and have nowhere to vent their depression to. Till the end of Yuan dynasty, social contractions became more and more serious which broke lots scholars’confidence of Mongolia regime, so they chose to live in seclusion and seek amusement during writings and paintings. Inherited the formation, literati paintings have matured in a shot span of89years, with closer combination of poetry、calligraphy and painting, and stronger sense of form of the paintings. Since calligraphy became more and more important in paintings, it also has positive influence on the development of calligraphy.When it comes to the hermit calligraphers of Yuan dynasty, Ni Zan is the most impressive one. His painting has simply and aloof grace of its own and gets more attention than calligraphy which turned his calligraphy reputation not so good as painting’s. And this is also the reason why I chose his calligraphy as my study subject.Restudy and rearrange Ni Zan’s calligraphy is the purpose which I try to attain in this paper. The mainframe of this paper as follows:The first chapter briefly analyses social background of Yuan dynasty, especially the calligraphy situation in Ni Zan’s time; The second chapter analyses Ni Zan’s succession of teachings from masters, and make a generally periodization based on the changing of his calligraphy; The third chapter discussed some issues of his inscriptive writings. For example, why he chose small regular script as his particular chirography, and is there a possible formulary in them. And the last chapter try to conclude Ni Zan’s aesthetics standard of calligraphy, and analyses his philosophical thoughts, and how this affected his style of inscriptive writings.