China

Visual arts

Enjoyment of the Chrysanthemum Flowers, ink and colours on paper by Hua Yan, 1753; in the Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri.The Saint Louis Art Museum, W.K. Bixby Fund

Painting and calligraphy, like poetry, were the domain of the elite, and most educated Chinese traditionally boasted of some competence in them. There are early anonymous and folk-oriented paintings on tomb and cave walls, and many works are known from the Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce). Fine-art painters are known by name from as early as the 6th century ce from historical records and serially copied versions of their works. Chinese painting is predominantly of landscapes, done in black pine-soot ink on fine paper or silk, occasionally with the addition of faint colour washes. The most vigorous period for landscape painting spanned the years from the Song (960–1279) to the Ming (1368–1644) dynasty.

Calligraphy rivals painting as a fine art in China, and paintings are often captioned with artfully written poems. Calligraphy reveals the great fondness the Chinese have for their written characters, and it ranges in style from meticulously and laboriously scribed “seal” characters to flamboyant and unconstrained “grass” characters. Calligraphy, as painting, is prized for a number of abstract aesthetic qualities, described by such terms as balance, vitality, energy, bones, wind, and strength.

Painting has undergone numerous style changes since the beginning of the 20th century. Before 1949, painters such as Qi Baishi (1863–1957) developed distinct new styles that internationalized traditional Chinese aesthetics. After 1949, pressure for a form of socialist realism made painters shift their focus to such subjects as factory scenes, peasant villages, and convoys of tour buses. But, with the liberalization of the arts that followed Mao’s death in 1976, more-traditional values reasserted themselves.

Sculpture and carving date to the Zhou dynasty or earlier. Tombs frequently contained burial dolls, said to have been made to replace live sacrificial victims, and many early jade carvings are related to burial practices and include body orifice stoppers and bangle bracelets. Of all the arts, sculpture received the greatest boost from the introduction of Buddhism to China during the Han dynasty and from the spread of Buddhism during the Six Dynasties (220–589 ce) and Tang periods. Statues and carved reliefs of buddhas and bodhisattvas were made by the thousands; along with cave paintings, they represent the pinnacle of Chinese religious art. One of the most notable sites is the Mogao Caves (“Caves of a Thousand Buddhas”) complex near Dunhuang in Gansu province, designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1987.