Calligraphy is a unique art in China. The more national, the more cosmopolitan, and the more personalized. Shen said: "It is universally acknowledged that China's calligraphy is the highest art, with colorless and brilliant pictures, silent and harmonious music, attraction and enjoyment." Calligraphy has the beauty of pictures, but it is different from pictures. What's the difference? Calligraphy is the art of lines, which express beauty with abstract lines, while pictures express beauty with color blocks, colors and concreteness. Although the picture is abstract, it gives people a concrete visual feeling after all. Although pictures also use lines, lines are used to represent objects, and calligraphy uses lines to represent words, just like music. We can't point out what a sentence represents, we can only give people a general image. Its lines can't show you what the concrete expression is, which makes people feel as an emotion as a whole, while the concrete things are at a lower stage, and it is an improvement to rise to abstraction. Therefore, the use of concrete expressions in the advanced stage of line calligraphy is actually a retrogression of calligraphy and epistemology.

I once wrote an article to discuss with the painter Mr. Liu Huaming. In my opinion, at first, our ancestors began to understand the world with concrete images and create words. For example, when a stone is first placed on the ground, it means that the sun rises from the horizon. This is the origin of the word "Dan", which is the most concrete; The fish portrayed by the ancestors on the pottery pot of Banpo site was completely in the shape of a fish, and then the word "fish" was created with lines, which is an abstract line and more advanced than drawing a fish. So I think understanding the world is from concrete to abstract, but Mr. Liu and I are completely opposite. He said that putting a stone on the ground means that the sun rises from the horizon, which is not abstract thinking. Isn't it abstract thinking to draw a few lines on the fish in the clay pot? I think it makes sense. I think this argument between eggs and chickens is also a public case, so there is no need to be too stubborn. But from the perspective of epistemological principles, the development of human understanding of the world always develops from concrete thinking to abstract thinking, and also to a higher stage. Some of China's hieroglyphs are taken from nature, some from objects, and some from bird tracks, so people can know what they are at a glance. However, it is a basic fact that words are abstract, and it is also a fact that abstract realm is higher than concrete. Therefore, calligraphy is called higher art than painting, even the highest art, which is determined by its essential reasons.