Painting

This section explains what the tradition is, how it developed, what its categories mean, what viewers were trained to look for, and how the connection with Taoist thought works. This page gives the overview.

The material basis

Chinese painting uses the same equipment as calligraphy: a soft brush, ink ground from a stick, and absorbent paper or sized silk. Colour exists and is sometimes important, but ink is primary and a great deal of the most admired work is monochrome.

This is not a limitation the tradition regretted. Because ink varies only in density and dilution, painters developed an extreme sensitivity to tonal gradation, and the tradition holds that ink alone contains all colours in the sense that it can express everything that matters about a scene. Whether you accept that or not, it explains why colour is often absent from work of the highest reputation.

The material also rules certain things out. Absorbent paper cannot be corrected or painted over. There is no equivalent of building up a surface in layers over weeks. A brushstroke is a single event, and the painting records the order and speed in which it was made.

Painting as an extension of writing

The single most useful thing to understand is that Chinese painting is a line art descended from calligraphy, not a tonal art descended from observation of light.

The same brush, the same ink, the same trained hand, the same vocabulary of stroke quality. Painters were calligraphers first, and criticism of painting borrows calligraphic terms constantly: a line has bone, has force, is alive or dead. The tradition explicitly states that writing and painting share an origin.

This has consequences a Western viewer needs to know. Shadow is generally absent, since a line does not cast one. Modelling by light is largely absent. What carries the work is the character of the line and the disposition of ink and empty space.

The categories

Subjects divide conventionally into three: landscape, flowers and birds, and figures. The ranking is not what a European tradition would produce. Landscape is the highest genre, flowers and birds sit in the middle, and figure painting, including portraiture, ranks lowest.

Cutting across this is a distinction of manner. Fine-line painting is meticulous, uses outlines filled with colour, and takes a long time. Sketching-the-idea painting is rapid, wet, abbreviated and expressive, and is what most people picture when they think of Chinese ink painting. Both are respectable, but the tradition's stated values favour the second, for reasons connected to who was painting.

The literati question

From the Song onward, Chinese painting divides socially as well as stylistically, and this division organises everything written about it.

On one side are professionals: court painters, workshop painters, artisans who painted for a living to commission. On the other are scholar-amateurs: educated men who painted for themselves and their friends, did not sell, and considered painting an extension of poetry and calligraphy.

The literati asserted that their work was superior because it expressed the mind rather than displaying skill, and because it was not done for money. They also wrote the criticism, compiled the histories and defined the canon. The result is a tradition whose own account of itself systematically favours one group, and modern scholarship spends a good deal of effort correcting for that bias. A great deal of professional work is technically superb and was disparaged on social rather than artistic grounds.

The six principles

Xie He, in the fifth century, listed six criteria for painting, and the first has dominated discussion ever since. It is usually translated as spirit resonance or life-movement, and it asserts that a painting must be animated, must have a quality of living energy, and that this matters more than accuracy.

The remaining five are more concrete: the brush method must have structure, forms must correspond to objects, colour must suit the thing depicted, composition must be properly arranged, and one must copy and transmit models. That last principle is worth noting, because it makes copying a formal part of the discipline rather than a stage before originality.

Space without a vanishing point

Chinese painting does not use single-point perspective, and this is a deliberate difference rather than an ignorance. A handscroll unrolls over metres and the viewpoint moves with the viewer; a fixed vanishing point would make no sense.

Instead, distance is conveyed by placement, by the height of elements on the picture surface, by atmospheric fading, by overlapping, and by conventional treatments of near, middle and far. Landscape theory names three distances — looking up at a mountain, looking through into the depth, and looking across a level expanse — and a single painting may use all three.

The effect is that a Chinese landscape is often not a view from a spot but a construction you travel through. Painters said as much: a landscape should be somewhere you could walk, live and wander, not merely somewhere you could look at.

Words and seals on the painting

A finished Chinese painting normally carries text. The painter may inscribe a poem, a dedication or a note about the circumstances, and the calligraphy of that inscription is judged as part of the work. Seals are stamped in red, by the painter and afterwards by owners.

Later viewers added colophons, sometimes at length, sometimes many of them over centuries. These are not defacement. They are part of the object's history and were understood as participation in it. A famous scroll may carry dozens of seals and several metres of added writing, and the whole assemblage is the work as it now exists.

Formats

Paintings are mounted, and the format determines how they are seen. The hanging scroll is displayed on a wall for a period and then rolled away, so a collection is rotated seasonally rather than shown permanently. The handscroll is unrolled section by section on a table by a seated viewer, making it a sequential experience closer to reading than to looking. Album leaves are small and intimate, fans are constrained and difficult, and screens and murals exist at architectural scale.

Museums display handscrolls fully extended in cases, which is convenient and is not how they were meant to work. Knowing this changes how you read the composition, which was designed to be revealed in sections about an arm's width at a time.

What survives, and what that does to the picture

Any account of Chinese painting has to reckon with survival. Silk and paper are fragile, and fire, damp, insects, war and simple wear have destroyed most of what was made. For the earliest periods, what remains is a small and unrepresentative fraction.

This creates specific distortions. Many celebrated early works survive only as later copies, and the tradition of copying makes attribution genuinely difficult; a Song copy of a Tang painting may be an excellent painting and a poor guide to what the original looked like. Tomb murals and Dunhuang cave paintings survive in quantity precisely because they were sealed or remote, and they show a vivid, colourful, figurative art quite unlike the monochrome literati tradition that later dominated writing about painting.

The practical consequence for a viewer is that confident statements about early Chinese painting should be treated with the same caution as confident statements about early Chinese music. The written record is much fuller than the visual one, and the written record was produced by a particular class with particular preferences.

How to look

Several habits help. Look at the quality of individual strokes as you would in calligraphy, since that is where much of the value lies. Notice the empty areas as shapes rather than as background; in Chinese painting they frequently represent mist, water or sky and are compositionally active. Follow the implied route through a landscape, entering where the painter provided an entrance. Read the inscription if you can, or find a translation, since it often states what the painting is about.

And be patient with subject matter that seems repetitive. The tradition returns to the same motifs deliberately, and the interest lies in the treatment rather than in novelty of subject, in the same way that it does in a body of poetry using a fixed set of forms.

What the pages beneath this cover

Six pages. Begin with landscape if you mainly want to look at pictures; begin with ink and brush if you want to understand how they were made.

Origins and History of Chinese Painting runs from silk paintings and tomb murals to the mature handscroll, and explains why the centre of gravity shifted from figures to landscape between the Tang and the Song, and how the rise of literati painting changed the criteria. Likeness stopped being the first question anyone asked.

The Art of Ink and Brush answers the question outsiders ask first: how one colour can possibly be enough. The answer lies in gradations of density and wetness, in how the paper absorbs, and in the speed of the stroke. The page takes the old phrase about ink containing five colours and turns it into something operational.

Landscape Painting explains the three distances, high, deep and level, as a system for handling space, and treats it as a different solution from single-point perspective rather than a worse one. It also covers why so many named texture strokes came to exist.

Birds, Flowers and the Four Gentlemen covers why plum, orchid, bamboo and chrysanthemum were assigned characters, and how the genre moved from decoration toward using an object to say something about oneself.

Painting as Taoist Cultivation examines what the phrases in the critical literature actually claim, spirit resonance and taking nature as teacher while finding the source within, and which parts of that vocabulary were added by later commentators.

Great Masters and Further Study introduces Fan Kuan, Guo Xi, Ni Zan and Bada Shanren among others, notes where the surviving major works are held, and is honest about how much is lost between a reproduction and the original.

Key points

• Chinese painting uses the calligrapher's brush, ink and absorbent surface, so strokes cannot be corrected and the painting records the order and speed of its making.
• It is a line art descended from writing rather than a tonal art descended from observing light, so shadow and light modelling are largely absent.
• Landscape ranks as the highest genre and figure painting the lowest, which reverses the European hierarchy.
• The literati defined the canon and disparaged professional painters on social as much as artistic grounds, and modern scholarship corrects for that bias.
• There is no single vanishing point; space is built from multiple distances so that a landscape is travelled through rather than viewed from a spot.
• Inscriptions, seals and later colophons are part of the work and record its history rather than defacing it.