This album of excerpts from The Classic of Changes serves as an exemplary work by Sun Xingyan 孫星衍 (1753–1818). Written in 1812, this album is a work from Sun’s later years. The characters are carefully constructed with smooth, steady, and slender strokes, which are characteristic of his small seal script. Indeed, Sun’s style of thin strokes , belongs to the type of seal script known as “iron-wire” seal script (tiexianzhuan 鐵線篆), which was favored by a number of calligraphers who specialized in small seal scripts during the first half of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912). Here, a few facts about these calligraphers will be of help in understanding Sun’s album.

Many Qing calligraphers who preferred to write in neat and unembellished seal script found their model in Li Yangbing 李陽冰 (ca. 729-780).See Fu Shen et al, Traces of the Brush: Studies in Chinese Calligraphy (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1977): 52. A junior relative of the great poet Li Bai 李白 (701–762), Li Yangbing is regarded as the calligrapher who returned to popularity small seal script, which was first developed in the Qin Dynasty (221–206 b.c.). Having studied small seal inscriptions written by Li Si 李斯 (280–208 b.c.), the prime minister of Qin Dynasty, Li Yangbing developed his own style, emphasizing balance and neatness with slender but strong strokes.See Fu Shen, ibid., 44. Approximately ten stone inscriptions in small seal script attributed to Li’s hand became models for later calligraphers. One of the inscriptions is the Stele of the Qian or Modesty Hexagram, which is the excerpt from the Classic of Changes that Sun copies in this album in the Seattle Art Museum.

Sun Xingyan not only copied Li Yangbing's neat, thin strokes, but also followed Li’s example in standardizing the size of his characters, despite differences in stroke density from one character to the next. As a result, the characters fill the space of the vertical rectangles created by red-lined grid of the paper.

To prevent his characters from appearing monotonous, Sun varies the way he writes some of the characters, particularly those repeated in the hexagram. For example, the hexagram is titled qian 謙, and the character appears twenty times; however, none of the characters are the same because—following the example of Li YangbingAs for how Li Yangbing altered the characters in his Inscription of Qian Hexagram, see Tang Ciyao 唐嗣堯and Du Zhonggao 杜忠誥, eds., Li Yangbing Qiangua zhuanshu 李陽冰謙卦篆書 (Taibei: Huazheng shuju, 1984). —he wrote each one differently. Similar variation can be seen in other repeated characters in the album, like tian 天, di 地, junzi 君子, bu 不, and so forth.

No matter how he wrote characters, it is true that in his calligraphic works Sun Xingyan never deviated from Li Yangbing’s model. Sun was unlike the well-known Qing calligrapher, Deng Shiru鄧石如 (1743–1805), his contemporary who, as a pupil, began by imitating Li Yangbing’s inscriptions, including the Modesty Hexagram, but eventually broadened his scope to include stylistic elements of Li Si’s calligraphy.See Mu Xiaotian 穆孝天, ed., Deng Shiru juan 鄧石如卷 (Beijing: Rongbaozhai, 1995): 20-21. See also Fu Shen, Traces of the Brush, 53, and 295, n. 57. Sun, by contrast, continued to favor Li Yangbing’s style.

Sun Xingyan did not exert more effort in his practice of calligraphy simply because he was preoccupied with his scholarship. A scholar of broad learning and extraordinary achievements in many fields including history, philology, textual studies of the classics, editing, stone inscriptions, even medicine, military tactics, and many other fields,For Sun’s many fields of expertise, see Fang Chao-ying, “Sun Hsing-yen,” in Arthur William Hummal, ed., Eminent Chinese of the Ching Period (1644-1911), 2 vols. (Taibei: Ch’eng Wen Pub. Co., 1964-1970): 2:675-677. See also Benjamin Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspect of Change in Late Imperial China (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1990). Sun modestly said that he neglected the practice of seal script.Sun, “Preface” to his Pingjin guan wengao 平津館文稿, 1a, in Sun Yuanru xiansheng quanji 孫淵如先生全集 (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1919). As he explained, he was able to write small seal script only because he became familiar with characters written in small seal script through his in-depth research of Shuowen jiezi 說文解字, an early Chinese dictionary dating to the second century. Nevertheless, this album is a telling example that Sun Xingyan was indeed an excellent calligrapher, and that his modest words about his achievements in calligraphy should not be taken literally.

© 2013 by the Seattle Art Museum