The Second National Collegiate Seal-Cutting Artistry Contest was co-organized by the Seal-cutting Artistry Club of TKU and held at the Taipei Campus of TKU on Dec. 3. Two of TKU students passed the first round, but only Lee Chung-ran, a grad student of the Institute of Chinese Linguistics and Documentation won an award or Good Work at the finals.

The theme of this year’s contest was the “Arrival of Luck and Fortune” and the parts of the text required to be carved on the seal came from the first chapter, Lesson from the States, of an ancient Chinese book, Shi Jing (Book of Odes). Particularly, the text is the poetry known as Jiu Mu under the section called The Odes to the Zhou and the South in the first chapter. The poetry contains good wishes to newly-wed couples, and the 94 contestants from 15 colleges and universities were expected to carve some of this text on a 3x3 surface of a stone on the spot within a limited time at the contest. In the end, 85 pieces of work were completed, and 30 of them were chosen to be in the finals. It was amid such a fierce competition that Lee won an encouraging degree of recognition from the jurors, who are mostly renowned artists in this field. Lee has some mixed feeling about this recognition as he expected to have done better. Yet, he is aware that his apprenticeship as a seal-carver has been relatively short; he does have plenty of room to improve on, so he hopes that he will do much better next time.(~ Ying-hsueh Hu )