Student sells calligraphy to support low-income students

Hua Wen, an MRes Environmental Sciences student at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, has been practising calligraphy since the age of six. Over the past five years, she has been supporting low-income students through her fundraising project called “Ink Power for Schooling”. So far, Wen has financially assisted 52 primary and secondary school students in Xinjiang province and Nantong, Jiangsu province.

Wen’s Calligraphy work

Charitable calligraphy

In 2019, while she was a Year Two BSc Environmental Science student at XJTLU, Wen donated to the charity in her hometown, Rugao in Jiangsu province, and established the charitable fund “Ink Power for Schooling”. Since then, she has been using the proceeds from selling her calligraphy works to support disadvantaged students.

According to Wen, this fund supports two groups of students. The first group includes top-performing but economically disadvantaged students in grades one to nine at the 187th Regiment Middle School of the Tenth Division of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. The second group includes low-income students in Nantong, Jiangsu province who have received university admissions offers.

Every year, Wen collects funds by selling her calligraphy works. She has sold more than thirty copies of Heart Sutra, a famous sutra in Buddhism. Yufei Qin, an alumna of XJTLU’s BSc Financial Mathematics programme, and several other XJTLU students from Nantong have also donated to support the fund.

Hua Wen participated in the ‘Public Welfare Day’ at XJTLU

Passion ignited

Wen developed a passion for calligraphy from a young age. Her calligraphy teacher incorporated elements from Chinese classics or stories about renowned calligraphers, and this approach fuelled Wen’s enthusiasm.

During her ninth-grade summer vacation, Wen started practising small regular script (xiaokai), a style of calligraphy famous for its neat and compact appearance. She began writing characters that were two centimetres in size and gradually reduced them to one centimetre, focusing on famous calligraphy works such as Heart Sutra, Red Cliff Ode, and Tao Te Ching.

“Small regular script requires a high level of brush control. When practising this script, one must fully immerse themselves and enter a state of complete focus, often referred to as a ‘flow state’, by setting aside distractions such as phone messages,” says Wen.

 Hua Wen (right) and her calligraphy work

When Wen entered university, her father encouraged her to combine her calligraphy skills with charitable initiatives to support other students.

“By selling my calligraphy works, I hope to contribute to society in my own way by supporting the education of disadvantaged students. This is how the fund’s name ‘Ink Power for Schooling’ came about,” Wen says.

By Luyun Shi
Translated by Xueqi Wang
Edited by Xinmin Han and Patricia Pieterse
Photos courtesy of Hua Wen