Visual Culture - Medieval Period

China -

Calligraphy:

Calligraphy is a very important part in the Chinese history and their culture today. They have used calligraphy when creating the design on masterpieces, such as scrolls and the design on the pottery of the Yangshao culture. Venerable scrolls which are still around today are to be kept out of the light and only brought out on special occasions. This is so they do not get destroyed, and allows them to be preserved longer. There has always been a link between calligraphy and painting; they range from different sizes and it remains a major part when it comes to art in china.

There are four different parts to calligraphy, these are the bush, ink, paper and stone. these are know as 'the four treasures of the artist study'.....
The key when it comes to understanding and mastering calligraphy is how you use and control the brush. The brush was the main essential when doing calligraphy; this was made with bamboo and rabbit hair. This type of brush has been used since the Neolithic period, and the earliest surviving brush dated back too the Warring States Period.
The later bushes that were made for calligraphy were made using different animals hair, this made different thickness brushes which allowed you to use them for the strength, width and direction of the strokes when creating art; it allowed you to have the choice of using the tip of a brush or the full brush. The Chinese had a pattern where they would write in vertical columns. This was due to them writing on the strips of bamboo or wood. They didn't write vertical for everything, they would write horizontal when it comes to writing on the top of the door, it would also be written right to left.
It  has only been due to the western influences that they have started writing left to right. They started to write on silk instead of wood, but when it came to the invention of paper in the Eastern Han Dynasty, they decided to take that idea up due to it giving of different textures.
The ink that they used was made of lampblack and a kind of glue, they would mix it into a paste and put into a mould to dry. They would them rub the dried in onto a stone and added water to it. They said that 'the stone which the ink was rubbed on is a work of art itself'.
When staring to develop the art of calligraphy, it allowed you to use many Chinese characters and forms. Many of the first calligraphy characteristics were pictogram's, this lead to later characters using two pictogram's together. The structure of Chinese characters are not as straight forward as you would think they are, they are a variety of shapes, this allows them to be an ideal subject for calligraphy art.

Movable Print:

Printing techniques were advanced further in the Ch'ing-li period (1041-1048), it was advanced through the invention of movable print. Although it was a great invention, it was time consuming and very costly. Each piece of movable type had a piece of Chinese character, which were carved on a tiny piece of amalgam of clay and glue. Each of the carved blocks were used as a specific page of a particular book. To create the piece of movable print, the part which created the character was thin, as thin as an edge of a coin. Once creating this, it is placed in fire which hardens it.

For each of the commonly used characters there was at least twenty plus types for them, allowing each Chinese character to have several pieces of type for them. China were very protective over there printing materials, so when not using the type they were covered in paper to protect them and then grouped together according to the rhymes and stored away in wooden frames, although there were plenty of Chinese characters they would come across certain characters which had not been made up in advance, so this was when the had to create them.
In 1313, a man called Weng Chen commission a craftman to carve 60,000 characters which were carved onto movable wooden blocks.
Centuries movable type and block printing existed side by side in China.

In the Xinjiang area, it wasn't certain when movable print and printing was introduced, but in the 13th century in Turfan there were printing materials found in several different languages.
Around the 13th century printing from China had reached the West due to people visiting and taking tings which inspire them to create. A man called Johannes Gutenberg, he was inspired by Chinese print which lead him to create it in the West. Gutenberg perfected all of his techniques and his sophisticated press designs typesetting methods, allowed a mass collection of books to become a reality and the technology spread throughout Europe.
By the 15th century, printing had become know in Holland, Germany and Prague; they were on the path to perfecting their printing techniques by using movable print.

The invention of Chinese movable print has helped the Chinese culture to progress, allowing them to develop their technology; also allowed them to advance their human civilization.