The boulders hiding in the alcove of Tong Yang-Tze’s apartment testify to this Taiwanese calligrapher’s daunting perfectionism.

在董阳孜的公寓，藏在角落的纸堆证明了这位台湾书法家对完美令人生畏的追求。

They are paper — remnants of discarded artworks, crumpled together like used tissues and soaked into inky wads of pulp. Hundreds of old drafts of writing, including many of her efforts to draw Chinese poetry at monumental scale, have been recycled into these rocks over the years, most recently as she worked on her commission for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which will debut on Nov. 21. Curators call it the most important showing of calligraphy in the United States by a woman in recent memory and say it will bridge the art form from its ancient history to the 21st century.

它们是废弃的艺术作品，像用过的纸巾一样皱成一团，墨汁将它们浸透，成了一团团带着黑斑的纸浆。多年来，成千上万的草稿——包括以巨幅尺寸书写中国诗歌的尝试——变成了这些故纸堆。最近的一次尝试是她受大都会艺术博物馆委托所创作的作品，将于11月21日亮相。策展人表示，这是近年来美国最有分量的女性书法家作品展，并表示，它将把这一艺术形式从古代带入21世纪。

Earlier this fall, Tong, who is 81, unfurled scrolls on the floor of her Taipei apartment, pushing furniture to the walls before dipping a comically large brush into a mixing bowl filled with velvety black ink. She was preparing designs for the two paintings that will hang from the Met’s iconic entryway, the Great Hall. The texts consisted of sayings from poets born thousands of years ago, delivering messages about values like pragmatism and morality. But in the hands of a master calligrapher like Tong, the Chinese characters are also imbued with nuance — no two characters are ever the same — and moxie, in her supersized work. “Here in Taiwan, the immense freedom has allowed me to focus singlemindedly on developing my art,” she said.

今年秋天早些时候，81岁的董阳孜在她台北公寓的地板上展开一卷卷纸，家具已经推到了墙边，她将一支大得可笑的毛笔浸入装着柔滑墨汁的碗里。她正在为将悬挂在大都会艺术博物馆标志性入口大厅的两幅作品打稿。这些诗句都出自千百年前的诗人之手，传达了关于实用主义和道德等价值观的信息。但在董阳孜这样的书法大师手中，汉字也充满了微妙的不同——没有两个字是一样的——在她的巨幅作品中也是如此。“在台湾，无限的自由让我可以一心一意去钻研我的艺术，”她说。

董阳孜在台北的工作室展示她为大型书法作品绘制的草图，摄于9月。她在网上找到了超大号的毛笔。

And then, she dances. Heaving the giant brush across the 280-square-foot picture plane with shocking speed, Tong drew the Chinese characters that she has studied her entire lifetime. She was building on the lineage of old masters like Yan Zhenqing, an eighth-century calligrapher, military general and governor of the Tang Dynasty, attempting to revive a dying practice by making it contemporary, political and distinctly Taiwanese.

然后，她开始舞动起来。在26平方米的纸张上，她以惊人的速度挥动着巨大的毛笔，写下她一生都在研究的汉字。她师法八世纪的书法家、唐朝武将和地方官颜真卿这样的大师，试图借助现代性、政治性和鲜明的台湾特色的融入，来复兴这一行将消亡的艺术。

“I owe my artistic career to Taiwan,” Tong said, speaking through a translator.

“我把我的艺术生涯归功于台湾，”董阳孜通过翻译说道。

Considered one of her country’s most important artists, Tong was born in 1942 in Shanghai, on the mainland. She and her brother and parents moved to Taiwan (then called Formosa) in 1952, several years after Mao Zedong established the People’s Republic of China, forcing Chiang Kai-shek and his anti-Communist followers in government to leave for Taiwan. Three of Tong’s sisters stayed behind with an aunt, which led to decades of separation because of Taiwan’s volatile relationship with China. With an American friend’s help, they were able to arrange for her siblings to travel to Hong Kong to reunite briefly with the rest of the family after President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972.

董阳孜是台湾最重要的书法家之一，1942年出生在中国大陆的上海。1952年，她随父母和弟弟移居台湾（当时称福尔摩沙），几年前，毛泽东建立了中华人民共和国，迫使蒋介石及其反共追随者前往台湾。董阳孜的三位姐妹与一位姑姑留在大陆，两岸的动荡关系导致了她们长达数十年的分离。1972年尼克松总统访问中国后，在一位美国朋友的帮助下，他们得以安排一家人在香港短暂团聚。

Tong pursued calligraphy to pass the time, gravitating toward the bold linework of Yan instead of the examples of softer styles usually recommended to young girls of her time. Her father required her to practice writing 100 large characters and 200 small characters every day, starting in fourth grade.

董阳孜小时候以练书法消磨时间，她的习字更接近遒劲有力的颜体，而不是那个时代的年轻女孩通常被推荐学习的柔美字体。她的父亲要求她从小学四年级起每天练习写100个大字和200个小字。

It was the kind of artistic education that Tong said had largely vanished from mainland Chinese schools because of politics, with calligraphy practices left to the rarefied pursuit of artists and scholars (though in recent years, China has put a new emphasis on calligraphy in an attempt to reassert “traditional” Chinese culture). Taiwan continued to use the traditional characters, rather than the simplified characters the mainland uses, and taught calligraphy in its public schools for many decades, but the practice of calligraphy has been fading.

董阳孜说，出于政治原因，这种艺术教育在中国大陆的学校曾经基本消失，练习书法仅限于艺术家和学者的高雅追求（虽然在近年，中国重新重视书法，试图恢复传统文化的地位）。台湾一直使用的是繁体字，而不是大陆使用的简体字，而且数十年来，公立学校一直教授书法——虽然也已逐渐式微。

And globally, the number of people familiar with calligraphy is vanishing. Tong observed that most young Chinese speakers use electronic devices to automatically generate characters through transcription or by using English phonetics to prompt the characters.

在全球范围内，熟悉书法的人越来越少。董阳孜注意到，大多数说中文的年轻人都是在电子设备上透过注音符号或英文字母写字。

“I think nowadays people have gotten lazier,” said the artist, who spends the majority of her waking hours at work.

“我认为现代人变懒了，”这位艺术家说道，除了睡觉，她的大部分时间都花在了工作上。

Calligraphy is an instinctive practice for Tong. She develops her “word paintings” from small reference drawings that anticipate where every drop of ink will land on the scrolls. But she often compares herself to a jazz musician whose music is constantly changing. No two brushstrokes are alike, infusing her practice with a sense of spontaneity.

对于董阳孜来说，书法是一种本能之道。她发展出的“字画”从小幅的速写参照入手，明确了每一滴墨水将落在卷轴上的位置。但她经常把自己比作爵士乐人，音乐不断变化。没有两笔是相同的，这为她的作品注入了一种即兴成分。

“Everything happens in your mind,” the artist explained. “You just express it.”

“所有的一切都发生在你的脑海中，”这位艺术家解释道。“你只是将它表达出来。”

Given the size of her artworks — one of the biggest is a hand scroll measuring 6 feet by 170 feet — and the limited space in her apartment studio, everything must happen in rotation. The artist shifts around different portions of her scrolls as she works, unable to see the result until weeks later, when she rents a local warehouse to unroll several artworks at once. Sometimes, when she doesn’t like what she sees, she discards the calligraphy, adding to her collection of 17 boxes of the paper boulders, and starting again.

考虑到她的作品篇幅——其中最大的一件达到180×5200厘米——以及她公寓工作室的空间有限，一切都必须依次进行。创作的时候，卷轴的不同部分依次打开，几周过后才会看到最后的结果。有时候，她不喜欢最后的成品，就会将其作废，放进17个纸箱中，然后从头开始创作。

“She wrote more than 40 drafts for the Great Hall commission,” said Lesley Ma, the Met’s associate curator of Asian Art in the department of Modern and Contemporary Art, who selected Tong for the project. “And she is always anxious because maybe she wrote something in September, but is not able to see it until October. She looks for what is right and what is wrong.”

“她为大都会大厅的委约写了40多稿，”大都会艺术博物馆的现当代艺术部亚洲艺术副策展人马唯中说。“她总是很焦虑，可能是因为她9月份写的东西要到10月份才能看到最后的成品。她在寻找什么是对的，什么是错的。”

That level of uncertainty — bringing the possibility of failure — is what worried Tong’s father when his daughter announced her intention to become a calligrapher and to study Western art by traveling to the United States in the late 1960s. At the time, calligraphy was made mostly for gifts and favors, not as salable artworks. But Tong continued on her path, arriving at the Brooklyn Museum Art School in 1967 and graduating with an M.F.A. in painting from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1970. In the United States, she was inspired to start painting at a monumental scale after she saw works by artists like Matisse, whose “Dance (1) ” she admired for its energy and purity. She also felt a sense of competition looking at the gestural paintings of Abstract Expressionists like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, in which she saw the linework of calligraphy.

这种不确定性——存在失败的可能性——正是董阳孜的父亲在她宣布打算成为一名书法家、并于上世纪60年代末前往美国学习西方艺术时所担忧的。当时，书法主要用于赠礼和人情，而不是可以销售的艺术品。然而，董阳孜坚持走这条路，1967年来到布鲁克林博物馆艺术学校，并于1970年在马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校获得绘画硕士学位。在美国，她受到启发，开始创作大尺幅的绘画作品，尤其是在看到马蒂斯的作品《舞蹈（1）》后，作品传达出的能量和纯粹让她仰慕。她在观看威廉·德库宁和弗朗茨·克莱因等抽象表现主义者的动势绘画时，也感受到了一种竞争感，因为她在其中看到了书法的线条。

“I will show you,” she remembers thinking.

“我会让你们涨涨见识，”她记得当时自己这么想。

董阳孜在台北市立美术馆回顾展上的作品目录。这是她2011年的书法作品《鸢飞戾天，鱼跃于渊》。

Tong returned to Taiwan and subsidized her artistic practice with commissions, designing the visual signage at train stations and bookshops, for dance troupes and jazz musicians, and even adding Chinese characters to a Chanel anniversary ad campaign. Her work hangs in Taipei’s Songshan Airport and the city’s National Concert Hall, a sprawling arts complex.

董阳孜回到台湾，通过接受委约来支持自己的艺术创作，她设计火车站和书店的视觉标识，为舞蹈团体和爵士乐手创作，甚至为香奈儿的周年庆广告加入汉字。她的作品悬挂在台北的松山机场和国家音乐厅——一座庞大的艺术综合体。

In 2013, Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs invited her to create the country’s passport stamp, an honor that she humorously downplayed as easy work.

2013年，台湾外交部邀请她设计台湾的护照印章，面对这一殊荣，她幽默地说，这是一项很容易的工作。

“The characters were very regular,” she shrugged. “Not many people in Taiwan know that my calligraphy is on the passport stamp. I didn’t even discuss it with my brother. It is only when I go through customs that the immigration officers see my name and know it was me.”

“这些字非常规整，”她耸耸肩。“在台湾，没有多少人知道护照印章上是我的书法。我甚至都没和我的兄弟说过。只有当过海关时，移民官员看到我的名字才知道是我。”

董阳孜在翻看颜真卿灯中国著名书法家的作品，她经常在他们的作品中寻找灵感。

Thanks to those commissions, Tong became world famous without a presence in the art market.

由于这些委托，董阳孜虽然没有在艺术市场上出现，但却闻名世界。

Tong is hoping to recapture that boldness with the commission at the Met Museum. She has been thinking about her American audience, which probably has little exposure to calligraphy, and of her Chinese audience — which accounts for nearly four percent of the museum’s international visitors. (Before the pandemic, almost 10 percent of those visitors were Chinese.)

董阳孜希望在大都会博物馆委托作品中重新找回这种肆意。她一直在考虑她的美国受众，他们可能很少接触书法，还有她的中国受众，他们占博物馆国际游客的近4%。（疫情爆发前，近10%的游客是中国人。）

From nine different texts, the artist ultimately chose two for the Great Hall. One was inspired by the Book of Songs written nearly 3,000 years ago: “Stones from other mountains can refine our jade.” According to Ma, the phrase was traditionally interpreted to mean that talents from another country can be useful to one’s own. Modern interpretations have shifted to reflect on how accepting differences can help us improve.

她从九幅不同的字中最终选择了两幅作为大厅展品。其中一幅来自近3000年前的《诗经》：“他山之石，可以攻玉。”据马唯中说，这句话传统上被解释为来自另一个国家的人才可以对自己有用。现代的解释已经转向反思接受差异如何能帮助我们进步。

The other adage was written by the poet-scholar Su Shi in 1100 about his creative process: “Go where it is right, stop when one must” — a saying that reminds the reader to have self-awareness and practice moral restraint.

另一句格言是诗人学者苏轼在1100年所写，是关于创作过程的：“常行于所当行，常止于不可不止”——这句话提醒观者要有自知之明，要有道德约束。

董阳孜的大型书法作品的参考草稿。下方为正在创作中的作品。

For Tong, who has memorized hundreds of sayings, the phrases hold personal meaning. But she said she selected these texts to help people find their places in the world, expressing a desire to reach tourists from mainland China.

对于熟记数百句这样的话语的董阳孜来说，它们具有个人意义。但她说，她选择这些文字是为了帮助人们找到自己在世界上的位置，并表达了吸引中国大陆游客的愿望。

“I chose these words for the people who will read the works,” the artist said, adding that these visitors “will think about what the meaning is because they haven’t seen these words in a long time.” And now that they have started to read, she added, “they can reflect upon how to be a man, how to be a citizen, how to be free.”

“我选择这些文字是给那些会阅读这些作品的人，”艺术家说，她还说，这些观者“会思考文字的含义，因为他们很长时间没有看到这些文字了。”她还说，既然他们已经开始阅读，“他们就可以反思如何做一个人，如何做一个公民，如何获得自由。”