3 Answers

  1. In no particular order:

    Chinese painting is not steamed by naturalism — more precisely, it has its own approach to it. To put it very (very) crudely, things are depicted according to their essence, rather than their optics. In understanding the essence, there are some tensions between the conventional Buddhist, conventional Taoist, and conventional Confucian approaches, but these are nuances that do not always affect the form and content.

    Unlike Western art, Chinese painting is less concerned with volume and chiaroscuro, and more concerned with line and bone movement. Shitao wrote about the uniqueness of the feature as the quintessence of any painting.

    Secular art in Chinese painting appears almost from the earliest surviving examples (the early Han of the third century BC).Landscape painting appeared in the East almost a thousand years earlier than in the West, and highly individualistic impressionism — almost five hundred years earlier. Not to mention the conceptual techniques of ippin (逸品), such as blind and near-abstract writing, which deliberately go against the existing tradition – so if you ever find someone telling you that in the East everyone bows, and painting was invented in Europe, remember this paragraph.

    Many periods of Chinese painting were purposefully monochrome. Tang artists, in the heyday of classical painting, pushed the palette even further than the Han Chinese who preceded them. According to written testimonies, Wu Daozi, the chief craftsman of his time, sometimes worked without using color at all — the originals, however, did not survive, and Wu Daozi himself fell into the painted door of the imperial palace, but this happens quite often in those parts.

    Chinese painting has an ambivalent relationship with narrative. Painting on scrolls usually looks close, in segments of about half a meter, so the leading technique in it is not plotting, but juxtaposition and restrained contrast — especially since people in this format are not so much personalities as natural phenomena.

    Unfortunately, one of the features of this whole tradition will be that it is very poorly preserved, and among the surviving works there is a chaos of attribution and dating. On the other hand, it perfectly demonstrates the attitude of Chinese painting to itself: traditions tend to loop, works are normally rewritten, lost, and returned again in other incarnations.

    And, as with all art, you need to understand that Chinese painting all the way was a multi-voice of people of different ideas about the world, different social strata, different cultural trends-the same as we imagine European art in its best years.

    This polyphony can't be covered in the Q response, so you need to read books about it. It is not difficult to read: a volume of Cahill is read in the evening. Good luck.

  2. What kind of painting is this? In our European understanding, painting is a canvas, oil paints, a rich palette, a perfect plot, and all this is framed in a baguette. So, for both the Chinese and Japanese, fine art is at best watercolors in ink and nothing more. Only now, under the influence of the European tradition of painting, something began to appear there. But do any of the readers know at least one more or less well-known contemporary Chinese or Japanese artist, normal? No. They are not on earth.

  3. The details below are undoubtedly worthy, but in fact the modern viewer sees only primitive sketches, “ennobled” by the “brand of the author” and the hieroglyphs that should give solidity. And contemptuously leaves to enjoy the much more impressive painting of the Caucasian race.

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