A teacher had four students, an American, a European, an African and a Chinese. He asked them to write an essay on the topic “What is your personal opinion of the world food shortage?” “What is the world?” asked the American student. “What is a shortage?” asked the European. “What is food?” asked the African. Then the Chinese student asked: “What is a personal opinion?”

This rather dodgy old joke perhaps betrays our image of the Chinese as brainwashed and repressed. Yet there is an ancient tradition within China that has celebrated individuality and expressiveness for many centuries: shufa , or calligraphy.

Zhao Yizhou, whose work features in a special China supplement published in The Times this Saturday, is Britain’s leading contemporary Chinese calligrapher. His house is easy to spot in the suburban street. On the door is a large red and black Chinese character. I am greeted by a slim 47-year-old with Eighties rock-star hair. He leads me into his studio cum study, crowded with books and artefacts, where I am offered moon cakes and tea.

I ask how he came to be a calligrapher. He says that his initial interest came through his grandfather, who carved the jade seals that are used with traditional red ink to sign pieces of writing or a painting.

Zhao’s first public display of handwriting happened in 1970 in dramatic circumstances. His parents, who were in the military, were denounced after backing the wrong faction during the Cultural Revolution. As they were poorly educated, it fell to their son to write their confession, which had to be posted up around the courtyard of their unit.

When Zhao came to study formally in the Eighties, he found that the writing he had been doing was not calligraphy at all. “Calligraphy,” he says, “is just about calligraphy. It is a different thing from functional writing.”

It is a tradition that goes back at least 3,000 years. Originally it was practised by an educated elite to express their status and learning.

Today there are still professional calligrapher artists and it is a very popular amateur pastime. Maybe its popularity has something to do with the palaver that Chinese speakers need to go through to use a computer. They have to spell out what they want to say phonetically, using the Roman alphabet keyboard and a programme that will translate that into Chinese characters. Even then Chinese is so sensitive to tone that a choice of four translations may be offered.

In everyday Chinese life a vocabulary of 3,000 characters will be enough to get by, but calligraphers call on up to 50,000 in a selection of scripts such as seal, official, running, regular and mad. Calligraphy is said to reveal the inner qualities of the man behind the brushstroke. Stylistic choices can even declare a political position. It seems as much a performance as a graphic art, a dance move over in a moment.

Zhao says that works rarely take more than a minute — the brush cannot stay still on the absorbent rice paper or the ink will pool. Watching him, I see his mastery of pressure, speed, inflection, brought to bear in a concentrated burst. He says the first spontaneous attempts are often the best; successive versions usually lack the vigour of the initial effort. Looking through catalogues of his works, I am struck by the variety of moods: some works are sparse and delicate, dry swishes like whiffs of incense; other characters are bleeding blots that loom and fill the paper like a scholar’s rock.

I ask if coming to live in Britain had changed his calligraphy. He says that he prefers an audience that does not understand the meaning of the characters. In China viewers are too often obsessed with the literal interpretation of his work — “They concentrate on individual trees and ignore the forest” — while in the West people appreciate it for its abstract beauty. He showed me 40 versions of the character for donkey, with its circular component referring to the millstone powered by a donkey in Ancient China. Each wildly different interpretation alluded to the teachings of a different philosopher. Zhao’s calligraphy is admired for its power, humour and lively interpretation of the literal meaning.

Individualism came to be revered in the Tang Dynasty (AD618906). Calligraphy was admired for being bold and fluid, the fluid often being alcoholic. Daoist painters got drunk and painted with their hair or dragged each other over the painting surface. One calligrapher, Zhang Xu, said to be the originator of the “wild cursive” style, was named by the poet Du Fu as one of the “eight drunken immortals”.

Drinking plays a part in one of Chinese calligraphy’s most famous works, the Preface to the Orchid Pavilion Manuscript (AD353) by Wang Xizhi, which refers to a poetry competition in which 40 individuals were challenged to finish their composition before a cup of wine floating down a stream reached them. If they failed, they had to pay the forfeit and drink the wine.

Zhao nurses a tumbler of whisky and chain smokes while we talk. He claims his best work is done at 3am after a drinking session and he shows me a piece that consists of the same character painted at eight different stages of drunkenness. Maybe he drinks to lose his inhibitions, maybe there is some truth in the idea that the Chinese are repressed. As well as the work appearing in this Saturday’s China supplement, Zhao is also designing a Chinese language poster which will be given away free with The Times on Feb 17.

Chasing the Unseen: Chinese calligraphy by Zhao Yizhou is at the Museum of East Asian Art, Bath (01225 464640; www.meaa. org.uk), until April 15

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