Origins & History of Chinese Painting

Before painting was an art

Painted decoration on neolithic pottery goes back several thousand years BCE, but it belongs to ceramics rather than to painting as a separate practice. The earliest surviving works on silk come from Warring States tombs in the southern state of Chu, around the fourth to third centuries BCE: small banners showing a figure with a dragon and a phoenix, drawn in fluent line.

The Han period gives much more. Tomb walls were painted with processions, banquets, spirits and cosmological schemes. Lacquered objects carry fine painted decoration. The best known single object is the silk banner from the Mawangdui tomb sealed in 168 BCE, a T-shaped painting showing the underworld, the human world and the heavens in a single composition.

All of this is funerary or decorative. It was made by anonymous craftsmen and served a function. Painting as something valued for itself, made by named individuals, comes later.

Painting acquires names and theory

During the centuries of division after the Han, painting became a subject of criticism and painters became individuals with reputations. Gu Kaizhi, in the fourth century, is the first painter about whom substantial writing survives, and a scroll attributed to him, known through an early copy in the British Museum, is the standard reference point for the period's figure style.

Xie He in the fifth century wrote the six principles, which fixed the vocabulary of criticism for the next fifteen hundred years. His first principle, spirit resonance, made the animating quality of a work more important than its accuracy, and everything written afterwards responds to that.

Buddhism and colour

The spread of Buddhism from the Han onward transformed Chinese painting, and this is regularly underplayed in accounts written from the literati perspective. Cave temples at Dunhuang, Yungang and elsewhere contain enormous quantities of wall painting from the fourth century onward, much of it brilliantly coloured, figurative and narrative.

This tradition employed professional painters working to religious commissions, used pigment heavily, and drew on Central Asian and Indian models. It is the largest surviving body of early Chinese painting by a wide margin, and it looks almost nothing like the monochrome tradition that later writing treats as central. Any account that begins with ink landscape is skipping the majority of what actually survives.

The Tang

Tang painting is dominated by figures. Court painters produced portraits of emperors and officials, and painters such as Zhang Xuan and Zhou Fang specialised in court ladies, producing an idealised full-figured type that is instantly recognisable. Wu Daozi, of whom nothing survives, was celebrated for wall paintings executed with extraordinary speed and became the tradition's model of the inspired painter.

Landscape emerges as an independent subject in this period. The blue-and-green manner, using mineral azurite and malachite over ink outline, produced brilliant decorative landscapes associated with Li Sixun and his son. The tradition also credits Wang Wei, the poet, with founding monochrome ink landscape, though nothing certainly by him survives and the attribution was made retrospectively by later literati who wanted a poet as their founder.

Monumental landscape

The period from the tenth to the early twelfth century produced what is generally considered the summit of Chinese painting. Painters in the north — Jing Hao, Li Cheng, Fan Kuan, Guo Xi — developed a landscape art of enormous scale and physical presence, with towering central mountains, tiny human figures, and meticulously observed rock texture and tree structure.

These are not decorative works. They are attempts to represent the structure of the natural world with the seriousness of a philosophical statement, and the theoretical writing that accompanies them, particularly Guo Xi's essay, discusses how mountains change with the seasons and the hours, how to compose the three distances, and why a viewer should be able to imagine living in the scene.

In the south, a softer, wetter, more atmospheric manner developed with Dong Yuan and Juran, using rounded hills and moisture-laden air. Later literati preferred this southern manner, and their preference shaped the canon.

The Song academy and the literati response

The Song court maintained a painting academy, and under Huizong in the early twelfth century it reached a peak of technical refinement, particularly in bird-and-flower painting of extraordinary precision. Academy painters were examined, ranked and given official status.

Against this, Su Shi and his circle articulated the literati position: that painting should express the mind of a cultivated person, that formal likeness is a child's criterion, and that the value of a work lies in what it reveals about its maker. Mi Fu developed a manner of blunt ink dots for misty hills that owes as much to calligraphy as to observation.

This is the origin of the division that runs through all later Chinese art writing, and it should be understood as a claim by one social group about another as much as an aesthetic argument.

Southern Song and the corner composition

After the loss of the north in 1127, the court relocated south and the academy continued. Ma Yuan and Xia Gui developed a distinctive approach: the composition weighted into one corner, a few sharply defined foreground elements, and large areas of empty silk representing mist and water.

These paintings are among the most immediately appealing to modern viewers and were enormously influential in Japan. Later Chinese critics, following literati preferences, treated them as somewhat superficial, which is a judgement worth noticing as a judgement rather than accepting.

The Yuan and the triumph of the amateur

Mongol rule removed the examination system for a time and left many educated Chinese without official careers. Painting became a principal outlet, and the literati manner became dominant rather than oppositional.

Zhao Mengfu argued for reviving ancient methods and for the unity of calligraphy and painting. The four masters of the late Yuan — Huang Gongwang, Wu Zhen, Ni Zan and Wang Meng — established the models that the following six centuries copied. Ni Zan in particular, with sparse compositions of a few trees, an empty pavilion and distant hills, and a deliberately dry, understated brush, became the type of the disengaged scholar-painter.

Ming theory and Qing orthodoxy

Ming painting divides into competing regional groupings, the professionally inclined painters associated with Zhejiang and the scholar-painters of Suzhou, among them Shen Zhou, Wen Zhengming and Tang Yin. Dong Qichang, at the end of the Ming, imposed an interpretation that has shaped the field ever since: he divided the entire history into a Northern school of professionals and a Southern school of scholar-amateurs, declared the Southern school orthodox, and constructed a lineage of correct descent.

The Qing inherited this. The four painters surnamed Wang, working in the early Qing, developed an art of learned variation on old masters that became official taste. Against them stood individualists: Bada Shanren, a Ming prince who painted sparse, strange, glaring birds and fish, and Shitao, who argued explicitly that method should follow from the painter rather than from tradition. The Yangzhou eccentrics of the eighteenth century worked in a similarly independent vein while also, notably, selling their work.

The modern period

Contact with Western art from the late nineteenth century produced a long argument about what Chinese painting should become. Some, including Xu Beihong, trained in Europe and imported academic realism and life drawing, holding that Chinese painting had become sterile through copying. Others held that the tradition should be renewed from within.

Qi Baishi, who came from a carpenter's background and painted shrimps, insects and vegetables with great directness, and Huang Binhong, whose late landscapes are dense to the point of near-abstraction, are the two most admired figures of the first half of the twentieth century. Zhang Daqian was a virtuoso in every historic manner, a famous forger, and later a producer of large splashed-ink works that engage with abstraction.

After 1949 painting was directed toward socialist realist subjects, with traditional landscape retooled to include dams, telegraph poles and red flags. Since the 1980s ink painting has developed in many directions, including explicitly experimental and abstract work, and the question of what continuity with the tradition requires remains genuinely open.

Key points

• The earliest surviving paintings are funerary and decorative works by anonymous craftsmen, and painting as an individually credited art begins after the Han.
• Buddhist wall painting is by far the largest surviving body of early Chinese painting and looks nothing like the monochrome tradition later writing treats as central.
• Monumental landscape of the tenth to twelfth centuries is generally considered the summit, and it came with substantial theoretical writing.
• The literati position articulated by Su Shi is a social claim as well as an aesthetic one, and the literati wrote the histories.
• Dong Qichang's division of the whole tradition into Northern and Southern schools shaped the canon and made the amateur lineage orthodox.
• The twentieth century divided between importing Western realism and renewing the tradition internally, and that argument has not been settled.