Students of elementary and secondary school in Guangzhou are about to enter the spring semester of 2021 with the hope of “saying goodbye to the pandemic and welcoming Spring”. Recently the Guangzhou Fangyuan Experimental Elementary School famous for its calligraphy held a Students Spring Festival Couplets Exhibition. Nearly 80 calligraphy scrolls such as Spring couplets, horizontal scrolls, and diamond-shaped Fu characters meaning “Good Fortune” hand-written by the students from first through sixth grades, previously pasted to the doors of more than 30 classrooms, now cover the whole schoolyard with the color red.
Through the couplets written in regular, official, and running scripts as well as other calligraphy styles the students expressed gratitude to their teachers, their pursuit of the ideals, and the love of the homeland and the school. The school principal Huang and the teacher-in-charge of the 4th group of the first grade are pasting the couplets to the sides of a door. The couplet handwritten by a 7-year-old student of the group Chen Huanran reads: “Among the four seasons of the year there always will be spring, the students of the fourth group of the first grade always will be good”. This innocent and childish poem is composed by the boy and his dad.
Twin sisters Ke Baoqi and Ke Beiqi from the fifth grade each wrote half of a couplet. One wrote the first line — “Let the spring make peaches and plums (students) blossom all over the world”, and the other wrote the second line — “Let the rain nourish the pillars of Fangyuan”. Now the girls along with their teacher-in-charge Wu Yueying and their classmate Cheng Yibao, who wrote the couplets for another classroom, work together to hang the scrolls at the sides of a door. In recent years, three students of the school have won main awards of the character writing contest held by the Guangzhou Bureau Of Education, all three came from the class of Wu Yueying.
According to reports, this year the China Calligraphers’ Association and China Artists’ Association in partnership with the Xu Beihong Painting Academy of China, the Overseas Chinese Calligraphers Association, and other art institutions in China and abroad, will host the Global ‘Love of Culture’ Chinese Painting and Calligraphy Exhibition. The exhibition gathered the calligraphers from over 40 countries and regions all over the world and also invited 9 students and alumni of the Guangzhou Fangyuan Experimental Elementary School to create artworks for the show, proving that the ‘love of culture’ spirit, preserved through the art of Chinese painting and calligraphy, had been passed on to the next generation of the Chinese people.
The Guangzhou Fangyuan Experimental Elementary School has been advancing school calligraphy education for more than 15 years, with such masters as Dean of the Guangzhou Yuehai Painting and Calligraphy Institute Chen Zhixiong personally coming to the classrooms to teach students calligraphy. The school also designed personalized materials for teaching calligraphy. Chinese language and literature textbooks for all grades include the poetry of Song and Tang dynasties and the 24-character set of the Core Socialist Values, organically combined with other educational materials, providing calligraphy practice for more than a thousand students of the school.