the trips  filled with love & signs.

In guidebooks about Taiwan, you’ll read about night markets, tea, and temples scented with sandalwood. Less often will you come across the story of a man sitting at a wooden table, spending hours arranging individual hairs one by one until, eventually, a brush takes shape.

And yet, for decades, Taiwan was one of the most important centers of traditional brush production in Asia.

The first time I understood the significance of a brush was not while looking at calligraphy, but while observing mountains.

In Chinese painting, a landscape is not created from lines.

One touch of the brush becomes mist, another a cliff, a third the shadow of a pine tree.

A brush is not merely a tool for applying paint. It is an extension of movement.

In Taiwan, there are still people who remember a time when calligraphy was a compulsory school subject.

During the 1970s and 1980s, millions of brushes were used there every year. Workshops operated continuously, and artisans produced thousands of brushes each month. Today, only a handful of masters remain.

Some say that the number of active makers of traditional brushes can be counted on both hands.

One of them is Chen Ching-tsung of Tainan. He began his apprenticeship at sixteen and, after more than fifty years, still makes every brush by hand. He uses no machines. As he puts it, a machine can create an object, but it cannot sense the character of the hair.

And it is precisely that character that determines everything.

The most highly prized brushes are made from Kolinsky sable hair.

They are resilient, return to a perfect point, and hold remarkable amounts of water.

For this reason, watercolor artists around the world still regard them as the gold standard.

Taiwanese manufacturers such as GrandArts continue to hand-select hairs and produce brushes from sable, squirrel, goat, and synthetic fibers.

But the most fascinating part is not the materials.

The most fascinating part is that a good brush is created more through rejection than through creation.

Masters explain that most of their time is spent selecting the wrong hairs and setting them aside.

Too short.

Too stiff.

Too soft.

Too curly.

Too straight.

The result is a finished brush containing thousands of fibers that behave like a single organism.

It reminds me of street photography.

Hundreds of strangers pass you every day, yet only one moment becomes an image.

Taiwan also has its own little-known tradition of making brushes from a child’s first haircut, known as tai mao bi.

Parents preserve them as family talismans and symbols of new life.

For many workshops, this tradition helped them survive the years when computers and smartphones nearly destroyed the calligraphy market.

When visiting brush workshops in Taiwan today, one has the impression of watching the last guardians of a certain rhythm.

Not only of a craft. Because a brush requires a kind of patience that has largely disappeared from the modern world.

You cannot write quickly with it.

You cannot create in haste.

You cannot deceive your own hand.

Perhaps that is why it reminds me so strongly of analogue photography.

In both cases, the tool itself is not what matters most.

What matters is attention.

Yet as a photographer, I am fascinated by something else entirely.

Looking at traditional Chinese landscapes painted with Taiwanese paintbrushes, I often feel that their creators were not painting mountains. They were painting the distance between a person and a mountain.

The mist between one breath and the next.

The silence between two movements of the hand.

And perhaps that is precisely why the artist`s brush remains alive despite computers, tablets, and artificial intelligence.

Because there are things that cannot be clicked.

They must be felt through the bristles, something the Taiwanese art of brush and ing continues to teach us today. 

Bella Argazam, May 2026

All images & orginal text ©All right reserved 2024

Bella  Argazam 

Izabela Kałczuga

NIP 629-185-82-73

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41-300 Dąbrowa Górnicza 

bella@bellaargazamphoto.com