Art History Today

Slides) The Evolution of Chinese Art: Painting, Drawing & Graphic art.

1) Map of the Silk Roads.

2) After Zhang Zeduan, Panorama of Along the River During the Qingming Festival, an 18th-century remake of the 12th-century original,  25.5 cm × 525 cm, National Palace Museum, Taiwan.

3) Unknown artist, A Tribute Horse and Camel, painted on paper found amongst documents at the Dunhuang Caves, China.

4) Att to the Emperor Huizong, Chinese Women making silk, remake of a lost original by Zhang Xuan, early 12th century, ink colour and gold on silk, 7.7 cm × 466 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

5) Unknown artist, 'Lady, Dragon and Phoenix' ancient Chinese silk painting (476-221 BC), excavated from Tomb of Chu State during the Warring States, Chenjia Mountain, Changsha, Hunan Province.

6) Unknown artist, 'Man Driving the Dragon' ancient Chinese silk painting (476-221 BC), excavated from Tomb of Chu State during the Warring States, Chenjia Mountain, Changsha, Hunan Province.

7) Yungang Caves, Datong, Shanxi, 5^th century A.D.

8) Yungang Buddha and Bodhisattva, c. 460-470 B.C., Northern Wei style, near Datong, Shanxi, China.

9) Brigands attack merchants on the Silk Roads, painting, Dunhuang Caves.

10) Unknown artist, Xuanzang, travelling Buddhist monk, 9^th century, Dunhuang Caves.

11) Rubbing of Chinese dragon, Han dynasty, location unknown.

12) Rubbing of a stamped brick from Chengdu, Sichuan, late Han Dynasty.

13) Stamped brick from Chengdu, Sichuan Teacher and Students, late Han Dynasty.

14) Entrance to Dahuting Tomb, Zhengzhou, Henan province, China, Eastern Han dynasty,

15) Doorway to Han chamber with stone picture of a deer.

16) Inside of Han Tomb with stone pictures.

17) Stone pictures in inner chamber.

18) Stone pictures, animals and chariots.

19) Banqueting scene in inner chamber, fresco.

20) Banqueting scene, detail.

21) Wang Xianzi, example of calligraphy, Tang Dynasty.

22) Zhao Mengfu writes the Tale of the Goddess of Luo River (洛神赋), silk scroll, Palace Museum, Beijing.

23) Zhao Mengfu writes the Heart Sutra (赵孟頫书心经墨迹), silk scroll, Palace Museum, Beijing.

24) Unknown artist, painted brick from the frieze of a tomb near Luoyang.

25) Same in colour.

26) Qianling Mausoleum, Liangshan Hill some 80 kilometers (50 miles) northwest of the Tang capital, Chang'an (today's Xi'an).

27) Tomb of Princess Yong Tai, Quianling Mausoleum, Tang Dynasty.

28) Tang Court ladies, fresco. (above)

29) Yan Liben, Emperor Taizong Receiving the Tibetan Envoy, silk, 120 cms long, Palace Museum, Beijing, detail.

30) Yan Liben, whole silk scroll, Palace Museum, Beijing.

31) Yan Liben, Tribute Bearers, Song copy of the Tang scroll, Song Dynasty (960–1279) National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan.

32) Mawang Banner, Han Tomb no. 1, Mawangdui Tombs, Changsha, mid 2^nd century.

33) Drawing of funerary banner, a symbolic painting found on the coffin of the lady portrayed in the centre of the banner.

34) Detail.

35) Mawangdui, Han tomb no. 1, detail of coloured painting on silk (bohua).

36) Map of the Silk Roads.

37) Map of China with Dunhuang designated.

38) Entrance to Mogao Caves, (“Caves of the Thousand Buddhas), dis late 19^th century.

39) Cave 7, Western Thousand Buddha Caves with murals.

40) Abbot Wang Yuanhu (1849-1931).

41) 10th century mural from Cave 61, showing Tang Buddhist monasteries of Mount Wutai, Shanxi province.

42) The Paradise of Amitabha, 8^th century, silk painting, 139 x 101.7 cms, Dunhuang Caves.

43) Photograph of Aurel Stein and his Team.

44) Cover of “Foreign Devils on the Silk Roads.”

45) Picture of Cave 16, by Aurel Stein in 1907, with manuscripts piled up beside the entrance to Cave 17, the Library Cave, which is to the right in this picture.

46) The Chinese Diamond Sūtra, the oldest known dated printed book in the world, British Library.[1]

47) Figures showing shading technique, and on the left, the effect of darkening of the paint used in shading which changed the appearance of the figure.

48) Detail of embroidered panel from the Library Cave. A small duck is shown in the middle among the flowers. Tang Dynasty.

49) Flying apsaras, or celestial beings. Caves 285, 538-539 AD, Western Wei Dynasty.

50) Fire Lance and a Grenade, 10th Century, Dunhuang.

51) Emperor Huizong of Song, Golden Pheasant and Cotton Rose Flowers with Butterflies (11th century), location unknown.

52) Guo Xi (Chinese: 郭熙; 1020-1090), Early Spring, 1027, hanging scroll, ink and colour on silk, Shan sui (Mountain Water) style, 158.3 x 108.1 cm, National Palace Museum., Taibei, Taiwan.

53) Xu Daoning, Fishing in a Mountain Stream, handscroll, ink on silk, detail, 48.3 x 209.6 cms, Nelson-Atkins Gallery, Kansas.

54) Guo Xi, Clearing Autumn Skies over Mountains and Valleys, Northern Song Dynasty c. 1070, detail from a horizontal scroll.

55) Li Shi, Part of Eight Views of Xiaoxiang, an imaginary tour through Xiao-xiang by Li Shi (李氏), 12th century scroll, 30 x 400 cm. Ink on paper. Tokyo National Museum.

56) Ma Lin, Landscape with figures, on or before 1246, Ink and colour on silk, 226.6x110.3 cm, location unknown.

57) Huang Gongwang, The first part of the Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, titled The Remaining Mountain, 31.8 × 51.4 cm, Zhejiang Provincial Museum in Hangzhou.

58) Huang Gongwang, whole scroll.

59) Wang Meng, The Simple Retreat, c. 1370, Hanging scroll; ink and colour on paper, 53 3/4 x 17 5/8 in. (136.5 x 44.8 cm) Overall with mounting: 101 1/4 x 24 3/4 in. (257.2 x 62.9 cm) Overall with knobs: 101 1/4 x 28 11/16 in. (257.2 x 72.9 cm), Metropolitan Museum, New York.

60) Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322), Autumn Colours on the Qiao and Hua Mountains, handscroll, ink and light colour on paper, dated 1295, National Palace Museum, Taiwan.

61) Qui Ying, Emperor Minghuang's Journey to Sichuan; a blue-green shan shui painting depicting the flight of Emperor Xuanzong from Chang'an, a late Ming Dynasty painting after an original by Qiu Ying (1494-1552).

62) Chinese artist with brush in upright position.

63) Chinese brush rest in the shape of a praying mantis, bronze, 18 cms, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, c. 1800.

64) Wu Zhen, Crooked Pine, Yuan Dynasty, 1335, Hanging scroll; ink on silk, 65 3/8 x 32 1/2 in. (166.1 x 82.6 cm) Overall with mounting: 100 1/2 x 37 1/8 in. (255.3 x 94.3 cm) Overall with knobs: 100 1/2 x 40 1/2 in. (255.3 x 102.9 cm), Metropolitan Museum, New York, Dillon Fund, 1985.

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[1] The British Library holds over 45,000 items collected by Stein, mostly comprising manuscripts, printed texts, and inscribed pieces of wood, written in a wide variety of scripts and languages, including Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit, Tangut, Khotanese, Tocharian, Sogdian, Uyghur, Turkic and Mongolian. The British Museum holds a collection of over 1,500 archaeological artefacts collected from various Silk Road sites by Stein, as well as non-literary items from Dunhuang Cave 17, comprising more than 240 paintings on silk or paper, 200 textiles, and about 30 woodblock prints.The museum also holds over 4,000 coins collected by Stein, about three quarters of which are Chinese, and most of the rest are Islamic.Images of all of the paintings and some of the artefacts are now included in the IDP database, and the coins may be added at a future date.

9) The Evolution of Chinese Art: Painting, Drawing & Graphic art.

Six Principles of Chinese Painting.

The Six principles of Chinese painting were established by Xie He in "Six points to consider when judging a painting" (繪畫六法, Pinyin:Huìhuà Liùfǎ) from the preface to his book "The Record of the Classification of Old Painters" (古畫品錄; Pinyin: Gǔhuà Pǐnlù) written circa 550 and refers to "old" and "ancient" practices. The six elements that define a painting are:

"Spirit Resonance," or vitality, and seems to translate to the nervous energy transmitted from the artist into the work. The overall energy of a work of art. Xie He said that without Spirit Resonance, there was no need to look further.

"Bone Method," or the way of using the brush. This refers not only to texture and brush stroke, but to the close link between handwriting and personality. In his day, the art of calligraphy was inseparable from painting (above).

"Correspondence to the Object," or the depicting of form, which would include shape and line.

"Suitability to Type," or the application of colour, including layers, value and tone.

"Division and Planning," or placing and arrangement, corresponding to composition, space and depth.

"Transmission by Copying," or the copying of models, not only from life but also the works of antiquity.

8) The Evolution of Chinese Art: Painting, Drawing & Graphic art.

A Note on Chinese Landscape Painting & Technique.

It took until the late Tang dynasty before landscape established itself as a genre in its own right, but today landscape painting in China is right at the top of the hierarchy of painting. The Chinese word for landscape painting actually means “Mountain, Water.”[1] According to the artist Rebecca Yue, Chinese landscape painting falls into three types based upon the colours used: “light colour,” “blue and green,” and “boneless style.”[2] In “light colour” landscape ink is used to structure the composition with other colours added gradually, burnt sienna being the main colour. “Blue and Green” Chinese blue is used, though sometimes gold can be applied in “gold paintings.” With “Boneless style” the ink that is used to structure the composition is omitted and only patches of colours are applied.[3] Apprentices would train with a master, usually of a particular school of painting, for about three years; after emulating the master’s style they were encouraged to try others. Unlike some genres, e.g. flower painting which demanded a more systematic method, landscape painting lent itself to a variety of styles which required versatility on the part of the artist.[4] The range of techniques available to an artist is quite dazzling: more than fifty brushstrokes “for painting the texture of mountains and rocks.”[5] In Asian art, paper, brush, ink stick and ink stone are called “the four treasures,” and there are a range of brushes ranging from bird’s feather to goat’s hair.

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[1] Rebecca Yue, Chinese Landscapes made Easy, (Batsford, 2007), 9.

[2] Ibid.

[3] On “boneless style” see Michael Sullivan, The Birth of Landscape Painting in China: The Sui and T’ang Dynasties (University of California Press,1980 ), 111.

[4] Yue, Chinese Landscapes, 10.

[5] Ibid.

7) The Evolution of Chinese Art: Painting, Drawing & Graphic art.

Main Techniques in Chinese Painting.

“If you aim to dispense with method, learn method. If you aim at facility, work hard. If you aim for simplicity, master complexity.” Chieh Tzu Yuan Hua Chuan in Mustard Seed Garden Manual, 17^th century.

Gongbi (simplified Chinese: 工笔; traditional Chinese: 工筆; pinyin: gōng bǐ; Wade–Giles: kung-pi) takes its name from a word meaning “tidy” or meticulous use of the brush. Gongbi originated during the Han era (206 B.C- 220 A.D) which was marked by a time of stability which encouraged the arts to flower, mainly amongst the upper-classes as only the wealthy could afford these artists. Gongbi requires drawing lines with the pen first to show the essential nature of objects; this is followed by ink washes and layers of colour. Exponents of the Gongbi style include the Tang Dynasty’s Yan Liben (c. 600-673 A.D.) and Zhang Xuan (713-755 A.D.).

Ink & Wash Painting, shui-mo (水墨, "water and ink")aka literati painting. Textual evidence suggests that Shan shui style painting (above) existed during China's Liu Song dynasty of the fifth century, but ink wash painting developed further during the Tang dynasty (618–907). The 8th-century poet/painter Wang Wei is generally credited as the painter who applied colour to existing ink wash paintings.[1] The art was further developed into a more polished style during the Song Dynasty (960–1279). It was introduced to Korea shortly after China's discovery of the ink. Ink wash uses tonality and shading which is achieved through changing the density of the ink, both “differential grinding of the ink stick in water and by varying the ink load and pressure within a single brushstroke. The form of Chinese ink is dry sticks, flat cakes and various other shapes. Liquid ink is made by “grinding the inkstick on an inkstone with water. The best ink is made from pine soot and animal glue.”[2]

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[1] Yushu Wang, Selected Poems and Pictures of the Tang Dynasty, (2005),

[2] Anne Farrer, “The brush dances & the ink sings.” Chinese Paintings and Calligraphy from the British Museum, Hayward Gallery, 1990, 7.

6) The Evolution of Chinese Art: Painting, Drawing & Graphic art.

The Dunhuang Caves on the Silk Routes.

“A great art gallery in the desert.” Mildred Cable on the Dunhuang Caves.

One of the most important examples of Buddhist painting are the murals in the Caves at Dunhuang, aka Tun-huang (Blazing Beacon) where the northern and southern Silk Roads converged at an important intersection, essentially China’s gateway to the west. This complex of caves cut into a cliff and measuring a mile long were decorated by itinerant artist monks; the earliest date for an opening of a cave would be about 366 B.C. when the monk Lo-tsun had a vision of a thousand Buddhas in a cloud of glory. No less than 487 caves were found containing art from all the main dynasties. And the caves comprised the following: painted murals, decorative and textiles, manuscripts, architecture, sculpture, and printed images. As might be imagined the Chinese are very protective of this magnificent treasure trove which had been excavated by European explorers and archaeologists. Men like the Hungarian-British archaeologist Aurel Stein who had a collection of books and manuscripts from the Library Cave at Dunhuang have infuriated the Chinese with their removal of cultural objects, art treasures, and significant finds from imperial tombs and chambers. These men who travelled the Silk Roads in order to find and extract Chinese cultural artefacts earned the unflattering name of “foreign devils.”[1] The actual function of the painted tombs and chapels were to give hope to the traveller of protection along the trade routes. Stein entered the town of Dunhuang on the morning of March 12^th 1907; and though he knew of the great art treasures there he did not intend to remove them.[2] But on seeing the Cave of the Manuscripts (above), various scrolls written in Chinese, Sogdian, Sanskrit, Tibetan; and on being shown painted banners by a local monk Wang Yuanlu, (which he found difficult to unwrap) on silk, Stein resolved to take some of these back to England to be opened in the laboratories of the British Museum where the paintings would be chemically treated and opened, an operation that would last seven years.[3] Though the Abbot grew more uneasy, through a mixture of bribery, cajolement, and an appeal to his religious sense, Stein persuaded Wang Yuanlu to let him take some manuscripts and paintings back to London. A measure of Stein’s guile can be seen in his account of the affair in On Ancient Central Asian Tracks, he wrote: “ On his return, he [Wang] was almost ready to recognise that it was a pious act on my part to rescue for Western scholarship all those relics of ancient Buddhist literature and art which were otherwise bound to get lost sooner or later through local indifference.”[4]

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[1] The tale of these intrepid explorers is told in Peter Hopkirk’s Foreign Devils on the Silk Roads: The Search for the Lost Treasures of Central Asia, (1980).

[2] Ibid, 158. The caves were first visited by Hungarians in 1879.

[3] Ibid, 168.

[4] Quoted in ibid. Twenty-four cases of manuscripts, paintings, embroideries were eventually deposited in the British Museum. These were eventually stored in a little room out of sight of the occasional Chinese visitor.

5) The Evolution of Chinese Art: Painting, Drawing & Graphic art.

The Origins of Narrative Painting in China.

Without the stimulus of Buddhism narrative painting would not have flourished in China. As explained above Buddhism was brought to China by the first century missionaries; but before this there were actual examples of narrative painting on the walls of brick tombs in the Han period.[1] These might be called rough exercises from life comprising figures with expressive faces and interesting poses. In addition to the few surviving paintings on brick tombs there were also narratives on lacquer wood panels, again from tombs as well as hanging scrolls. Painted hangings in the Tomb of Mawangdui at Changsa dating from the mid-second century unite the terrestrial world and the heavenly realm which is suited to the hanging vertical format. The Banner of Lady Dai (Xin Zhui) (above) invites us into a world of fearsome dragons, strange birds, and human figures executed in a dark palette which may “have been subdued with time.”[2] Though this type of banner which was draped over the coffin was traditionally thought to have been introduced via Buddhism, it is now believed that the format is native to China itself.[3]

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[1] Tregear, Chinese Art, 54.

[2] Ibid, 56.

[3] Michael Sullivan, The Arts of China, (University of California Press, 1984), 71.

4) The Evolution of Chinese Art: Painting, Drawing & Graphic art.

Calligraphy & Chinese Painting

“He who has command of his brush should not allow the brush to control him.” Wang Ssu-shan.

Calligraphy deriving from Greek words for beauty and writing is a decorative kind of lettering used in writing. The letterer was a descendant of the clerk or scribe who had “aimed at legibility and formality” in commerce.[1] But in the Far East where calligraphy was more cursive or flowing, the script blossomed into a fully- formed artistic entity; moreover the Chinese saw the aesthetic dimension of the lettering itself rather than seeing it as a symbol of some external beauty.[2] Neither are Chinese characters to be seen as “abstract designs” linked to modern art, an error into which western abstractionists fall because they do not under Chinese art.[3] Calligraphy played a formative role in Chinese painting which is why some of their painting can be called logographic since images are occasionally accompanied by logograms, i.e. a written character that represents a word or phrase. Calligraphy was much favoured by the literati of China, so it is unsurprising that it overlapped with the art of painting itself, another love of the Chinese elite. Moreover, calligraphy and painting shared “identical techniques” which binds them together more than aesthetics or philosophy. It was the use of brush, ink and paper that opened up greater possibilities leading to an outpouring of diverse artistic styles. A calligrapher would use a resilient brush, sometimes composed of animal hair or “the barbs of a bird’s feather, bound into a bamboo stick, with ink made of compressed pine carbon and light glue rubbed in water.”[4] With manipulation of the brush and steady control, the calligrapher could produce a range of brush strokes ranging from a rich heavy line to a delicate light stroke. Calligraphy would begin to make its presence felt by influencing narrative painting in China, which apart from painting on pottery, stone pictures, and other materials, can be considered the first formalised and structured type of painting.

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[1] Philip Rawson, Drawing, 137.

[2] Ibid, 138.

[3] As pointed out by Capek in Chinese Stone Pictures, 37: “Abstracted as the characters may be, they are not abstract designs, as some abstractionists in the west without any knowledge of Chinese approach them today. They communicate the meaning of language, and calligraphy thus differs from painting in the very basic fact that it is the communication of literal meaning in aesthetic form and not free pictorial creation.”

[4] Mary Tregear, Chinese Art, 50-51.

3) The Evolution of Chinese Art: Painting, Drawing & Graphic art.

A Distinctive Chinese Art: Stone Pictures.

“The lines are so sensitively and skilfully drawn that one is apt to forget that they are hollowed out in stone and not drawn with the brush.” Siren, A History of Early Chinese Painting (1933).

Chinese stone pictures refers to bas-reliefs, sculptured stones, or pictures carved in stone.[1] The rubbing is made out of absorbent paper and Chinese ink; the relief is then covered with moistened paper, and tamped down with a dry brush. After the paper has dried, Chinese ink is applied lightly over the paper with the result that all the raised lines projecting above the indented background come out black and the indented areas remain white. Rubbings (in Chinese ta-pen) predate the art of printing and originated as a way of copying and distributing inscriptions on stone. As far back as the Ch’in dynasty (221-206 B.C.) Chinese craftsmen carved inscriptions directly on rocks; such inscriptions commemorated military history, adventures and travels, commercial ventures, and the biographies of Chinese people. Reliefs done during the Han dynasty are particularly praised though they still remain virtually unknown to all but a few art specialists in the west. Stone pictures, a term seldom used by western scholars, are also difficult to fit into the various systems and categories so beloved of the west. As Capek explains, these “sculptured stones, usually cut in low relief, are not three-dimensional spatial forms. They have a graphic, pictorial quality and many Western writers on Chinese art have questioned wether they can be classified as sculptures at all as the term is understood in Western art.”[2] Such distinctions founded on Grecian and European ideals have not troubled the Chinese historian of art. In the words of one: “A combination of sculpture and painting, using the technique of our traditional line drawings, it is a distinctively Chinese form of art.”[3] As we shall see, just as there exists common ground between Chinese painting and calligraphy so there is mutual understanding between paintings and rubbings. For example, rubbings of Tang horses are thought to come from paintings.

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[1] This information from Abe Capek, Chinese Stone Pictures: A Distinctive Form of Chinese Art (Spring Books, 1962).

[2] Ibid, 36.

[3] Wang Tse-yun, quoted in ibid.

2) The Evolution of Chinese Art: Painting, Drawing & Graphic art.

Buddhism the Silk Roads & China.

“I show you sorrow, and the ending of sorrow"- The Buddha.

According to Frances Wood, Buddhism seems to have made its appearance in China during the first half of the first century B.C. [1] It may have come via the Silk Roads, so that the first real practitioners of the religion may have been “foreigners” from Central Asia who travelled these routes.[2] These individuals, some merchants, some scholars, had the daunting task of translating Buddhist texts into Chinese; note- the Chinese did not learn Sanskrit until the fourth century B.C. Buddhism within its homeland bifurcated into two streams: Mahayana or Great Vehicle “which stressed the selfless ideal of the Bodhisattva” who attained nirvana, but stayed in the world to help others attain it. And the second school is Hinayana or “lesser vehicle” which stressed the noble goal of becoming a saint. The first Buddhist monks would have ventured along the Silk Road to collect Buddhist texts for translation into Chinese. The traffic went both ways; for example, the monk Xuan Zhang left China to journey into Tibet and India, and back to China. A painting (above) shows him with a vision of the Buddha guiding him and his clapped-out horse. Despite its paramount importance to the arts, the effect of the new religion of Buddhism was slow to be felt in China; but when it did, Buddhism made its presence felt in iconography, temple and tomb building, and painting on scrolls.[3] Buddhist temples would provide the model for all religious buildings in China, and not only Buddhist but Taoist and Confucian too. Silk became important for Chinese painting because it was used as a surface upon which words could be written and images drawn and painted. This new silk method would eventually replace the bamboo “slip” book records of the Han dynasty. Handscroll joined hanging scroll as a preferred format for painting, and Buddhism was largely responsible for this shift in technique and medium.

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[1] Frances Wood, Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia (British Library, 2002), 93.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Mary Tregear, Chinese Art, (Thames and Hudson, 1980, rev 1997), 70.

1) The Evolution of Chinese Art: Painting, Drawing & Graphic art.

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 5^th-3^rd 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.

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[1] Lubor Hajek, Chinese Art, 57.