书法与汉字的可塑性 The Malleability of Chinese Characters

书法就是写汉字的线条艺术。鲁迅认为汉字具三美：意美、音美、形美。书法取汉字之形，所以说“形美以感目”。汉字的可塑性把它对书法自由发挥的约束性减到最低。

汉字的可识的前提下，可塑性很强。历经甲骨文、大篆、小篆、隶书和楷书而不改其骨架，草里行间各具风韵却能法古不泥、异流同源，完全符合多样而统一的形式美原则。

首先，汉字构形的基础部件-笔画，本身是丰富的。在不同的位置上，相同名称的笔画可能有着完全不同的形式特点，而经过组合之后，又能衍生许多其它形式特点。只要保持其点划和结构的相互位置关系基本稳定，其正斜、长短、方圆和粗细等，到结体的正斜，疏密，狭扁等等，在处理时都有很大的灵活性，变化的空间很大。因此具体到每一个书写者的笔下，汉字的形体总是千变万化而非千人一面的，即使是清代馆阁体也不例外。
其次，汉字在不同历史时期呈现出不同的面貌，形成不同的字体，各个字体之间的点画系统、结构原则既相联系，又相区别，使其形式更加丰富。西方表音文字、甚至东亚取材于汉字偏旁部首而创立的韩文、日文之所以无法独立发展成为一门书写艺术，根本原因就在于其形式的贫乏、简单。汉字的形式美因素丰富多彩，其根源就在于汉字由象形走向表意。这使得其形体的来源不全是约定的，而是通过“师法自然”获得的，约定不免简单，而自然则是无限的。师法自然并将从自然中获得的形体丰富性的特征坚持下去，使汉字的形式越来越丰富，从而为人们在书写时发挥创造能力提供了空间，为人们展现自己的审美追求准备了足够的“语汇”。

。

The term "ideogram" is commonly used to describe logographic writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters. However, symbols in logographic systems generally represent words or morphemes rather than pure ideas.
A logogram, or logograph, is a single grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme (a meaningful unit of language). This stands in contrast to other writing systems, such as alphabets, where each symbol (letter) primarily represents a sound or a combination of sounds.

A Chinese character is a logogram used in writing Chinese, Japanese and Korean . Its possible precursors appeared as early as 8000 years ago, and a complete writing system in Chinese characters was developed 3500 years ago in China, making it perhaps the oldest surviving writing system. Chinese characters are derived directly from individual pictograms or combinations of pictograms and phonetic signs.

Just as Roman letters have a characteristic shape (lower-case letters occupying a roundish area, with ascenders or descenders on some letters), Chinese characters occupy a more or less square area. The characters are composed of strokes which are the building blocks of its structure. The character structure is composed of component parts that are squashed together in order to maintain a uniform size and shape. The more component parts the character has, the more complicated it is. The character structures and the unique strokes written with a brush provide the calligrapher a high degree of freedom to express his feeling and emotion and thus form his unique style.

There is another reason for saying that the Chinese characters are malleable. This is because they can be written in many styles. There are five major styles of Chinese calligraphy – Seal (Zhuan 篆), Clerical (Li 隶), Running (Cao 草), Walking (Xing 行), and Standard (Kai 楷) Styles. Each major style has many variations or derived sub-styles throughout the Chinese history.

The calligrapher's expression can actually be extremely creative. He is free to produce an infinite variaty of styles and forms. To the artist, calligraphy is a mental exercise that coordinates the mind and body to choose the best styling in expressing the content of the passage.