Chinese Painting & the West
Europeans came late to Chinese painting and it was only in the period preceding World War Two, that books on Chinese art written by Europeans began to appear, subsequently increasing in the 1940s and beyond. [1] It might also be worth pointing out that Western painting and its methods have only appeared in China during the twentieth- century. Unlike the west, Chinese painting is generally made on paper and silk, not canvas or wood. The oldest painting on silk was actually discovered in 1949 in the suburbs of Ch’ang-sha, Human Province in a Ch’u tomb dating from the 5th-3rd century B.C. (above). Though Chinese painting has been subject to a number of theoretical studies based on its similarities and dissimilarities to Western painting, it is more circumspect to treat it as an entirely different phenomenon since the Chinese attitude to nature is different, and much of Chinese painting is bound up with the traditions of Buddhism, Taoism and eastern philosophy in general, which clearly western art is not despite optimistic attempts to yoke Chinese philosophy with modern art, and indeed the history of art.
[1] Lubor Hajek, Chinese Art, 57.
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