Reviving the Unconstrained Color and Seeking for the Blue-green Painting (original) (raw)
On the Meaning of the "Blue-and-Green Manner" in Chinese Landscape Painting
In Perspectives on the Heritage of the Brush, Lawrence: Spencer Museum of Art, 1998, pp. 65-77.
rrravelers among Streams and Mountains by the scholar-amateur painter Wan Shanglin 1. (1739-1813), a large hanging scroll dated 1808 now in the collection of Roy and Marilyn Papp [fig. 22], depicts a party of upper-class riders on muleback and servants on foot ascending a path up a wooded mountainside. The deciduous trees are bright with foliage and flowers in blue and white. In the upper reaches of the landscape, in a setting of pines, water falls and mist, a man in a white robe welcomes another by gesturing toward his habitation. Is this painting to be read, then, as a depiction of an actual journey taken in the artist's own time? Several factors would preclude such a reading. The costumes are traditional, not the contem porary Manchu dress seen in such paintings as the Southern Inspection Tour scroll by Wang Hui , which is also in the Papps' collection. I The subject matter, travelers riding through a park-like landscape, is a venerable theme, and the composition of the landscape fonns intentionally makes art-historical reference to the classic compositional types of Northern Song (960-1127) landscape painting. Certainly the most arresting aspect of the painting, the one that most immediately removes it from the realm of the here-and-now, is its artificially brilliant color.
Ecological culture in Chinese traditional Mountain and Water painting
shanshui magazine, 2022
As a developing discipline, ecological aesthetics came into being in combination with traditional aesthetics under the increasingly serious global ecological crisis. Analyzed from a theoretical level, ecological aesthetics studies aesthetic issues from an ecological perspective, and also pays attention to ecological issues from an aesthetic perspective. It returns to the origin of life and the foundation of survival, rebuilds the mode of coexistence and connection between humans and nature, advocates the establishment of the concept of "affinity" between them, emphasizes being close to, respecting and adapting to nature, The art of Chinese Mountain and Water painting (shanshui hua 山水画 ) and its theories contain aesthetic thoughts of harmony, symbiosis and co-prosperity. Mountain and Water painting began to sprout during the Wei and Jin Dynasties and began to move towards independence. During this time, many painting theories appeared, all of which contained rich ecological wisdom. By analyzing the texts and paintings of two fundamental Chinese traditional artists, Zong Bing’s Introduction to Mountain and Water Painting, Hua shanshui xu, 《画山水叙》and Guo Xi’s Essay on Mountain and Water Painting, Linquan gaozhi 《林 泉高致》, we see how the realization of a mountain and water painting is not only an artistic practice delivering aesthetic pleasure, but it is also an experience of self-cultivation and spiritual improvement, thanks precisely to a life in harmony with nature. The aesthetic thought of the ancients is full of ecological consciousness, and it embodies the ancients' desire for the ideal living condition of harmonious coexistence between humans, humans and nature, and humans and society. The environmental thinking is an important part of the main currents of the Chinese traditional philosophical thinking we find in Confucianism, Chan Buddhism (Zen) and naturally in Daoism. Zong Bing’s (375-443) text is one earliest treatise on Mountain and Water painting. He himself was a hermit at Mount Lu Lushan 庐山, who was devoted to Buddhism, a disciple of Hui Yuan 慧远 (334-416), and a great master of the Chinese Buddhist traditions who also founded the White Lotus society Bailian she 白莲社on Mount Lu. In the Introduction to Mountain and Water Painting it is also possible to find Daoist conceptions on the relationship between human and nature. And Guo Xi (ca. 1000-1090), is one of the most important figures in the history of Chinese painting, he is a creator of works of the highest level, his Essay on Mountain and Water Painting is a fundamental text for the theoretical structuring of mountain and water painting, which from the perspective of Confucianism, also presents an extremely rich concept of ecological aesthetics. He constructed an art world with natural ecology as the aesthetic object, so that literati and intellectuals can retire from the burdens of the human society. In Chinese landscape painting, the vector perspective is not included, as it is an element that limits the representation of a grandiose subject like the mountain environment. Instead it is represented with a combination of multiple points of view, as in this way the observer will not be able to see the work in a single glance, but the observer’s gaze must travel within the painting, as if he was actually in the mountains experiencing closeness with nature and receiving the aesthetic benefits along the way.
The Boolean Journal, 2015
In this paper I will describe the evolution of Chinese landscape painting throughout the period which led from the awareness of a primordial aesthetics to the emergence of Chan Buddhism. In fact, since the Chan tradition had a pervasive and profound impact on the Far Eastern cultures, it should be analysed in a more rigorous manner than it was in the past. In particular, my thesis is that the Chan Buddhism consistently influenced the aesthetic canons and artistic themes of the epoch, expressing through the artworks original concepts and relevant philosophical ideas.
Heaven, Earth and Humans: Color Harmony in Chinese Culture
Heaven and Earth and Humans, 2012
The Five-Elements-Theory (also called phases, essences or stages) is an important doctrine of ancient China: merging the wisdom and life experience of our ancestors, it is a reflection of Chinese culture that certainly has practical value and completeness. The Five-Elements-Theory discusses the harmonious relations and interactions of heaven, earth and humans, which provide considerable research value not only in a cultural connotation, but also in the field of natural sciences.
Philosophical Origins of Absence of Color in Chinese Painting
Eastern aesthetic experience, which is best represented by the brush-ink Chinese painting. Influenced by the Taoist and Confucian philosophical doctrines, it reflects the traditional principles of loneliness, poverty, and simplicity. Visualizing the Chinese traditional dualism, the black and white system goes beyond an artistic style and resembles a state of contemplation which invites to complete unity with nature. The final goal is selfannihilation in the light of the principle of non-expression.
In the contemporary milieu, the purpose, meaning and definition of colour is exclusively different. Without understanding its socio-cultural-anthropological relevance and peculiarities, it normally or profoundly used in diverse level with various perspectives. Thus, it degenerated merely as an element of pleasing by considering its extraneous beauty. Actually, most of the animals have not the abilities to identify colours; with some exceptions that they were only identifies red and black colours. Colours also bear some incredibly mysterious believes. While evaluating the colours in primordial art forms, its significances related with primitive man " s straight attempt to comprehend the universe, environment and his race itself. On a wider level, the colours of environment affect behaviour a nd mood. Nature with its colours makes a person as livelier. The colours of the interior environment wherein a person live or work influence in just the same way as those in the natural world always did. The colour concepts of Kerala are visible in the face, body paintings of performers in folklore-rituals and mural paintings. In Kerala Folklore-rituals the face painting is termed as Mukhathezhuthu. The paper is an attempt to explore the genetics and politics of colours. There will also be an effort to examine the psychological concepts of colour and the paper also focuses the colour concepts in Western folklore rituals and in Eastern Kerala folklore-rituals special reference with Face colouring or " Mukhathezhuthu'.
The Interiority of Landscape: Transcendence in a Late-Ming Painting of Snowy Mountains
Asia Major, 2021
This article argues that late-Ming-era landscape paintings can be understood best historically in the context of such cultural practices as Daoist visualization and the discourses that accompanied it. Taking a Snowy Mountains-themed painting, it critiques the Cartesian perspective by demonstrating that landscape paintings were not regarded as closed objects available to the thinking subject for mere aesthetic appreciation. Instead, they were thought to possess an interiority that afforded space for the human spirit to roam in. A certain teleology associated with this practice was the merging of the beholder's human body with that of a purported broader cosmic body, thereby also giving interiority to the physical world-including landscape. Access to this space, or, "entering the mountains," allowed for a momentary yet reproducible experience of transcendence. To make this argument, the article draws upon late-imperial narrative prose, Daoist texts, and other materials from the same period, all describing the cultural significance of this pattern of interiority, accessibility, visualization, and merging of bodies.
Asiatische Studien - Études Asiatiques, 2020
This paper attempts to delineate the relation of early Chinese views on vision and visuality to nascent reflections on painting arising in the Early Medieval period. Ever since that time, pictorial creativity has been associated with Buddhist ideas of spiritual perfection. Likewise, the Early Medieval concern for the visualization of spiritual journeys to exceptional humans (and superhumans) through imaginary landscapes seems to be of Buddhist origin. The first part of this paper gives a short sketch of the intellectual landscape in which theorizing on painting since the 5th century CE first arose. The main body of the study, consisting of parts two through five, close readings of pre-Buddhist texts on vision and imagination. From these exploratory investigations it emerges that the very terms that are key in early reflections on painting such as ‘spirit’ (shen 神), ‘perspicacity’ (ming 明), but also ‘imagination’ (xiang 想) and ‘symbol’ (xiang 象) are closely related to a specific conc...
Reclusive Culture in Chinese Mountain and Water painting
Shanshui Magazine, 2021
In Chinese traditional thinking, isolation is often a prerequisite for the landscape painter in order to fully understand and express the characteristics of the subject he paints, as merely the external observation would be insufficient to comprehend and clearly describe the natural scenario. By analysing the texts of two fundamental Chinese traditional artists, Zong Bing’s Introduction to Mountain and Water Painting, Hua shanshui xu, 《画山水叙》and Guo Xi’s Essay on Mountain and Water Painting, Linquan gaozhi 《林泉高致》, and some paintings, we see how the realization of a mountain and water painting is not only an artistic practice delivering aesthetic pleasure, but it is also an experience of self-cultivation and spiritual improvement, thanks precisely to a life in harmony with nature.
The Notion of 'Qi Yun' (Spirit Consonance) in Chinese Painting
Proceedings of European Society For Aesthetics. Volumn 8 /2016 p. 247-268, 2016
‘Spirit consonance engendering a sense of life’ (Qi Yun Sheng Dong) as the first law of Chinese painting, originally proposed by Xie He (active 500–535?) in his six laws of painting, has been commonly echoed by numerous later Chinese artists up to this day. Tracing back the meaning of each character of ‘Qi Yun Sheng Dong’ from Pre-Qin up to the Six Dynasties, along with a comparative analysis on the renderings of ‘Qi Yun Sheng Dong’ by experts in Western academia, I establish ‘spirit consonance’ as the rendering of ‘Qi Yun’. By examining texts on painting by significant critics in Chinese art history, and by referring to specific works by painters from the Six Dynasties up to the Yuan Dynasty, I present the merits and demerits of the different interpretations by Western experts, and explore the essence of ‘Qi Yun’. Once the painter successfully captures ‘spirit consonance’ as the essential character or ‘internal reality’ of the object, and transmits it into the work, ‘Qi Yun’ further implies the expressive quality of the work beyond formal representation. Additionally, the fusion of expressive and representative functions also leaves space for further explaining the aesthetic interaction among artist, object, work, and audience. From the Six Dynasties onwards, Chinese painters have practised the expressive pursuit beyond epresentation on the basis of the unification of ‘Qi Yun’ (spirit consonance) and formal representation, although spirit consonance was valued more highly than formal likeness.
The tenth Karma pa, Chos dbyings rdo rje (1604–74), enjoys a prominent place in indigenous accounts of Tibetan art history, in which he is renowned as a great artistic innovator, who is noted for developing, during his twenty-five year long exile (1646/7–1673) in Lijiang 麗江, Yunnan, a unique style of painting that drew heavily on Chinese models. The vibrant local tradition of Sino-Tibetan painting, with its thorough mixing of Chinese and Tibetan visual modes, was already developed and flourishing in Lijiang at the time of Chos dbyings rdo rje’s arrival in the mid-seventeenth century, and, I will suggest, has relevance to the transformation of his own painting career. This study will primarily address questions of the transmission, influence, and adaptation of Chinese visual modes in the tenth Karma pa’s own unique visual idiom, by relating his works to specific Chinese painting schools and by exploring possible local sources for these innovations based on both visual and textual evidence.
Color in ancient and medieval East Asia
Asian Studies Review, 2016
Many years ago I went to talk to Wai-kam Ho, then curator of Chinese art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. Wai-kam told me that if I wanted to understand color in ancient China, the first thing I should comprehend was that color is a source of power. We talked further, but he brushed aside lesser questions to emphasize the importance of understanding that color has power. It was a potent force in ancient Chinese society. This book is the outcome of years of research and the collaboration of chemists, conservators, archaeologists, dyers, historians of art and literature, and scholars of Buddhism and Daoism. Separately and together we have worked to explore the roles that color-and specific dyes and mineral pigments-played in the social and political life, thought, art, and ritual practices of ancient and medieval East Asia. The source material is rich and includes dynastic histories, court documents, travelers' journals, merchants' ledgers, literature, Daoist liturgical and meditative manuals, paintings in tombs and Buddhist grottoes, religious icons, paintings on silk and on paper, pottery, lacquer, and textiles. The seeds for this book were sown at a College Art Association conference. In 2003 I organized a panel, Languages of Color in East Asian Visual Culture, for that conference and invited several scholars represented in this volume to discuss the role of color in East Asian cultures. Guolong Lai, Amy McNair, and I were joined later by chemist Richard Laursen at a small, exploratory colloquium, The Power of Color in Ancient and Medieval East Asia, at the University of Kansas in September 2010. The meeting was sponsored by the Spencer Museum of Art and supported by a seed grant from The Commons Research Initiative in Nature and Culture, a grant designed to nurture and develop interdisciplinary, collaborative research at the University of Kansas. After two days of sharing research and learning each other' s vocabulary, 4. Color was used to indicate political authority, rank, and prestige in systems understood throughout East Asia. 5. The courts, aristocracies, and bureaucrats of kingdoms throughout East Asia were color-literate. They knew the dye plants that produced the correct colors and those that produced non-official popular colors. They understood the particularities of each plant, the properties of the colors it yielded, and the principles of dye technology. Poets could, and did, use 8. Edward H. Schafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T' ang Exotics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 208. Schafer referenced the Tang liudian [Compendium of administrative law of the six divisions of the Tang bureaucracy] (Kyoto, 1935), 22, 21a. For an English translation of the Tang liudian, see: Wallace Johnson, The T'ang Code, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979 and 1997). Core components of the Five Agents Direction Season Element Color Planet Directional Animal Musical tones South Summer Fire Red Mars Vermilion Bird jue (mi) East Spring Wood Blue/green Jupiter Azure Dragon zhi (sol) North Winter Water Black Mercury Black Tortoise/ Snake gong (do) West Autumn Metal White Venus White Tiger shang (re) Center * Earth Yellow Saturn Yellow Dragon yu (la) * an intercalary period sometimes described as midsummer and sometimes as a period between summer and autumn. essays. I am greatly indebted to him as a friend and colleague. Colleagues across the University of Kansas have supported the project as participants in the two colloquia and as consultants. In addition to Amy McNair, I would like to thank