Calligraphy Festival «Thiều Húc Đằng Quang»

   Brush-and-ink writing still has people who practise it, and the Calligraphy Festival run by the Văn Khoa Calligraphy Club is a chance to watch them work on a university campus. Visitors move through a row of culture booths, complete a task at each one to collect stamps, and walk away with a piece of calligraphy written for them by a working calligrapher.

   The festival takes its name from a Sino-Vietnamese phrase, Thiều Húc Đằng Quang, which pictures the clear brightness of early morning sunlight. The organisers made that the thread running through the day: a new semester has just opened, and the festival is meant to charge it up. The programme has been staged before and returns this year.

   The whole event is built as a set of booths rather than a stage with an audience in front of it. At each booth you try things yourself, ask the person behind the table, and trade the result for a stamp:

• — hands-on time inside a traditional art space;
• — interactive activities written fresh for this edition;
• — a closer look at calligraphy explained by people who do it for a living;
• — calligraphy pieces written on the spot and given away;
• — the student community that cares about language, culture and art.

   The doors are open to students of the Faculty of Literature and of Linguistics, to students of the university as a whole, and to pupils and students from schools across Ho Chi Minh City. You do not need to belong to the faculty to walk in, only to register through the organisers' form beforehand.

   The setting is part of the story. The University of Social Sciences and Humanities, VNU-HCM inherits the legacy of the old Đại học Văn khoa; by its own account that adds up to 70 years of history, more than 40 degree programmes and more than 100 student clubs and groups. This festival is the work of one of those groups, assembled by students.

   Calligraphy is a craft of patience: the writer controls the load of ink, the angle of the brush and the speed of the hand at the same time, and every stroke happens once, with no correcting it afterwards. Most people only ever meet the finished, framed result. Here you see the process, and you get to try it.

   You do not need to know how to write to come. Leaving with a sheet of paper someone inked for you alone is a decent way to start a semester.