Language: Mandarin Chinese
My zēng zǔ mǔ (曾祖母, great-grandmother) was a talented artist who painted stunningly beautiful Chinese-style paintings. When she passed away earlier this year, she left all her paints and paintbrushes to me. I painted this picture using the supplies she gave to me, looking to her paintings as inspiration and researching Chinese watercolor techniques online. I know that I still have a long ways to go in learning how all her supplies works, but I hope that my attempts to paint like her will be able to carry on her legacy in the future!
Editor's Notes:
Kinship
曾祖母 or zēng zǔ mǔ translates to great-grandmother in English, but it specifically denotes one's paternal great-grandmother. Chinese uses the Sudanese kinship system to name relatives. A kinship system is the structure of how individuals are organized into families in particular languages and societies, and the Sudanese system in particular defines distinct terms for each relative one has. In this case, 曾祖母 specifically means paternal great-grandmother. Chinese distinguishes maternal and paternal relatives and also relative age and gender for family members.
Chinese Arts: Art and Language
Historically, the "Four Arts", or 四藝, were the four sophisticated pursuits of the gentry in China. They included qin (琴, a seven-string instrument), qi (棋, the strategy game of Go), shu (書, Chinese calligraphy) and hua (畫, Chinese painting). Starting in the Song Dynasty, artists integrated calligraphy, poetry, and painting into their works, such as on an album leaf or fan, creating a new style based on these "three perfections" and leading to the literati or scholar painting movement. Consequently, many paintings focused on poetic sentiments of the scenery and have beautifully written, classical Chinese poetry on the paintings, which shed more insight on the work's themes and the creator's ideas. Furthermore, both calligraphy and painting used brush pens, inks, and watercolors on silk or thin paper, as well as similar brushstroke techniques. The close tie between painting and literature in the Chinese arts, and its intersection through literati painting and calligraphy as artful writing, leads to a curious conclusion: visual art speaks with lyrical words, and language comes alive, paints itself as art.
Chen is a high school junior from Livingston, NJ.
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