My first thought on reading the first post was that "empty" space referred to unoccupied pints that are still valuable. Space could also refer to space between stones, such as extensions. Then thin and overconcentration could be involved.

Have the art terms figure and ground been mentioned? It was difficult to read this thread so I might have missed them. In any case I wondered whether this dichotomy was relevant. It seemed it might be since the figure defines the ground and vice versa. I also wondered whether the Japanese use of "feeling" is relevant.

My first thought on reading the topic subject was... Major Tom...

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Converting the book Shape UP! by Charles Matthews/Seong-June Kim
to the gobook format. last updated april 2015 - Index of shapes, p.211 / 216

I feel like posting a bunch of art. Maybe it will support Nyanjilla's point some more. I am not an art connoisseur or anything, I have slow nights at work and browse Wikipedia. These are mostly fairly famous people.

Anders Zorn: one, two. Maria Fortuny: one, two. Degas: one, two. Hunt. Caravaggio. Van Gogh.

These are all paintings, mostly oil paintings, so of course "empty space" is kind of relative; they are obviously less empty--louder--than something like this. (Van Gogh copied a Hiroshige print, for what it's worth; maybe a side-by-side comparison could be interesting for the purposes of the thread.) But some appreciation for emptiness definitely seems to be there. So I don't think that you can say that in general it is the appreciation (the presence or amount of appreciation) that Asians have for empty space that lets them play go better. Maybe it's the way they appreciate it?

In this vein, note also that all of the above paintings (particularly Fortuny's) make strong use of asymmetry. I do not know Japanese and am also unfamiliar with calligraphy (except for several old threads here), so I can't say how asymmetry is used in Japanese calligraphy specifically, but I would be really surprised if a Western artist's problem in writing characters was her inability to handle asymmetry. Is it possible that the people in the course you mentioned had some different problem? Perhaps a belief that writing was not art, and that a lack of symmetry was only welcome in art, or something similar. It is, after all, definitely welcome in art, and a necessary part of an artist's skillset--in fact, I can't recall a single Western work of art that I've seen that was really symmetrical; even in portraits the composition is usually broken up somehow. Probably the Chinese understanding of yin and yang is something different--I can't comment on it, knowing nothing at all of Chinese aesthetics, past or present--but, again, some significant appreciation for the concept does seem to exist in the West.

This, by the way, is why Bill's quote of McLuhan's statement that Westerners feel that two sides should be equal surprised me immensely. I still can't see where that idea comes from or how it could be supported, at least if it is meant to relate in any way to aesthetics.

John observed that some Western artists in a Japanese calligraphy class had trouble because they tried to make the two sides of the characters equal. I recalled my reading as an undergraduate about the "dynamic asymmetry" of Chinese characters. I also mentioned that McLuhan pointed out that Western thought, including esthetics, became rationalized in modern times. I -- not McLuhan -- said that making the characters symmetrical might be an example of rationalization. (I did not mention it, but the Golden Ratio, BTW, is an example of asymmetrical rationalization. ) Neither I nor McLuhan said that Westerners feel that the two sides should be equal. John observed that in some Westerners.

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Everything with love. Stay safe.

Ah, sorry. I took "One example of this rationalization is the feeling that two sides should be equal" as the general statement that modern Westerners with their rationalized thinking feel that two sides should be equal.

While I'm posting, let me voice a vague concern about speaking about western and oriental people as though either group were homogenous. I know there have been studies that show that there is some difference between the groups but I don't know how large and diverse the study groups were. I'd be very curious whether e.g. carpenters, mathematicians and poets, or men and women, from the same country are any different in this regard. Does anyone know?

Perhaps the members of the class lacked some explanations about the "laws" of writing / painting Japanese ?

I know some Ikebana-Ladies, who also practice Japanese calligraphy / shodô. We have to assume that these Ladies are specialists in "harmony", and also are well aware of the fact that "harmony" requires "a-symmetry".

However, the first astonishing issue that takes me by surprise is that the painted Kanji do not really fit a squared grid. This is true especially for Kanji that are a compound of -- let's say -- two elements. If the two elements are vertically oriented (one right, one left), the Kanji is too wide; if the two elements are horizontally oriented (one top, one bottom), the Kanji is too high.

By the way: There are Kanji with two vertically oriented elements, where both elements have 50 % of the Kanji's width each, but this is not the rule.

I think that it must be very difficult to write these Kanji with using ink, and a paint-brush; and I really admire these Ladies, who have so much patience, and stamina. One reasoning for the relative displacements described above might be a primary assumption that each stroke must have the same width, and also the same amount of "empty space" around it, which implies a minimal distance between the strokes.

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The really most difficult Go problem ever: https://igohatsuyoron120.de/index.htm
Igo Hatsuyōron #120 (really solved by KataGo)