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The art of Chinese painting has a long history. In thousands of years, there have been many celebrated painters and numerous great works of art. The following section concentrates on guohua (meaning literally “Chinese national painting”), a traditional style which has been passed down through many generations.

Chinese painting is one of the four traditional Chinese artistic skills gin, qi, shu and hua (gin: a plucked seven-stringed Chinese musical instrument of the zither family; qi: Chinese chess and/or weigi, i.e. go; shu: calligraphy; hua: painting).Chinese painting was also called danging (literally “red and cyan”) in ancient times.Scrolls are usually made using juan (silken cloth), xuan paper, or silk. The artist will then apply either black ink or colored pigment, using different kinds of paint brushes,including special soft brushes, or sometimes the fingers. Chinese paintings can usually be classified into three genres: figure painting, landscape painting and flower-and-bird painting.

Before the Song Dynasty, Chinese paintings were usually done on either silk or silken cloth. These materials were very expensive, and Chinese and Chinese painting was therefore confined to portraits of the nobility or pictures of their life, hence the genre of figure/portrait painting. One of the best-known exponents of this genre is the painter Gu Kaizhiof the Eastern Jin Dynasty, whose masterpiece Admonitions of the Instructress to Court Ladies is the earliest of its kind as we know. It is a narrative figure painting first painted on a hand scroll, and currently resides in the British Museum.

Like figure painting, Chinese landscape painting also has a long history, reaching its zenith in the Tang and Song dynasties. Wu Daozi, Li Sixun and his son, and Wang Wei are some of the most famous landscape painters from this period. From the Song Dynasty onwards, painters began to use xuan paper as the primary medium for their painting, which greatly reduced costs. Chinese painting gradually became more diverse, In both its subject matter and techniques, and by the Ming Dynasty was becoming a popular pastime with ordinary Chinese people. As a result, genre painting became an important subject matter in the wider field of Chinese painting. By the end of the Qing Dynasty, influenced by painting styles from around the world, particularly Europe, Chinese painting had made use of more diversified materials, developing in many directions.

By comparison with oil painting, Chinese painting is unique in terms of its creative philosophy: focusing on spiritual resemblance rather than formal resemblance, emphasizing the importance of an overall impression over the detail and accuracy of a sketch, the use of a scattered perspective rather than a focused perspective, and the preference of artistic conception over the faithful representation of a scene. Some techniques of oil painting, such as the configuration of light and shading, and the accuracy of anthropotomy, are of course also greatly valued in contemporary Chinese painting.

Calligraphy is another of the four traditional Chinese arts gin, qi, shu and hua.It is the most iconic symbol of the Chinese nation in the development of traditional Chinese art and culture in the past 5,000 years. It is an art form with its own standards of aesthetic appreciation writing Chinese characters with a brush. In China, calligraphy and painting derive from the same source. Over the course of the development of Chinese culture, they have gradually evolved into two separate forms.

The beauty of Chinese calligraphy is in the beauty of its lines. Each character is made up of brush strokes, and each stroke is made up of lines. In looking at the lines,and the forms composed of these lines, we can see different styles of writing and appreciate different aesthetics. The most common forms of handwriting are zhuanshu(seal script), lishu (clerical script), kaishu (regular script), caoshu (cursive script) and xingshu (semi-cursive script/running script). For each handwriting form, there are different handwriting styles. For example, the Zhong style, Wang style, Ou style, Yanstyle, Liu style and Zhao style are some of the best-known styles for writing kaishu(regular script).

To write Chinese characters well, the first thing to do is to write the different strokes well. In spite of the variety in handwriting forms and styles, Chinese characters are constructed with no more than eight basic strokes dian (dot), heng (horizontal line), shu (vertical line), pie (left-down slope line), na (right-down slope line), gou (hook), zhe (turning) and ti (short brushed stroke, from left to right). The Chinese character 7 (yong) consists of eight basic strokes, so ancient calligraphers advocated frequent practice of writing it. If someone can write the character 永 beautifully, they will have acquired the skill of writing the eight basic strokes. This method of practice is the well-known “Eight Principles of  Yong”. Learning calligraphy should start with a moxie, i.e. selecting a model of calligraphy, placing a piece of transparent paper over it, and copying the model with a brush. After a period of moxie, one can begin lintie, i.e. imitating the model on a piece of paper to one side and trying to write the characters as identical to it as possible.

Chinese calligraphy is a unique Chinese art, and the tools and materials essential to it are also unique, i.e. “the Four Treasures of the Study” as they are often called by Chinese people- bi (brush), mo (black ink stick), zhi (xuan paper) and yan (inkstone).

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