Artists › Painters and Calligraphers
Weng Fanggang
Qing scholar-official and calligrapher who studied bronze and stone inscriptions, argued for learning as the texture of poetry, and kept a Su Shi shrine in his study
A desk holds an unrolled sheet bearing three bold black ink strokes, with a rack of many brushes above it, a stone ink slab and ink stick, a porcelain bowl, a red lacquer box, a dish of red seal paste and a paperweight; a small seated figure shows through a round window onto bamboo.
Also known as Zi Zhengsan · Hao Tanxi
Weng Fanggang, courtesy name Zhengsan, styled Tanxi and in old age Suzhai, came from Daxing near Beijing. He passed the metropolitan examination in 1752 and entered the Hanlin Academy, served as education commissioner in Guangdong, Jiangxi and Shandong, rose to subchancellor of the Grand Secretariat and worked on the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries (Siku quanshu). An expert on inscriptions, he wrote studies of Han steles and of the epigraphy of Guangdong, and because he owned a Song printing of Su Shi's annotated poems he named his studio after Su and held gatherings on the poet's birthday. In poetics he argued that verse needs the solid grain of learning, the so-called texture theory (jili shuo), and his own writings were collected as Fuchuzhai ji. He died in 1818 at eighty-six by Chinese reckoning; as a calligrapher he was ranked with Liu Yong, Liang Tongshu and Wang Wenzhi.
Life and times
Dates 1733 CE–1818 CE