How to read Chinese paintings
The occasional Western visitor might be unsettled by the paintings presented here, as traditional Chinese paintings present features distinctive from paintings of other cultures of the past centuries. It is important to note that the purpose of painting may differ from one culture to another. The concept of "art" did not exist in China until the beginning of the 20th century, when the word "meishu" (美術) was coined, with various understandings of the vaguely-grasped Western notion of art. The idea of grouping together architecture, pottery, sculpture and painting into a single concept was then bewildering to the Chinese1. In this context, it is worth mentioning that two silk embroideries (see 15_12) are included among the reproduced art works, but they are called "embroidery paintings", rather than "pictorial embroideries".
One should first look for the rythmic vitality, or overall energy, of the painting. This is the first of the six canons of Chinese painting4, proposed by Xie He around 550 AD. Another point is that traditional Chinese painters aim at capturing not only (or not necessarily) the outer appearance of their subject, but mainly its inner essence. Imaginary landscapes are thus frequent among Chinese paintings. Painters often copy from older masters ("in the style of ..." ); this is the sixth canon, and a way to transmit the rythmic vitality of older works. Color is often a distraction, thus many paintings are in black and white. The usual subjects, bamboo, old trees, rocks, are well adapted to the brush used for calligraphy. Towering mountains evoque the emperor watching his subjects. Likewise, a horse may represent military strength. Trees may have crab claws, and rocks be devil-faced2. Waterfalls are a frequent feature of landscape paintings, perhaps because "water is the weakest and softest of things, yet overcomes the strongest and hardest5", thus conveying this rythmic vitality.
Landscapes are conceptualized in three ways. The level-distance composition is a view across a broad lowland expanse (e.g. 11_16+11_17, 14_03). The high-distance one is a view of towering mountains (03_04, 04_12), and the deep-distance a view past tall mountains into the distance2 (06_14, 12_07).
One distinctive feature of traditional Chinese paintings is calligraphy. Mastering the art of calligraphy is a prerequiste for making a painting, as traditional Chinese painting involves the same techniques as calligraphy. Painters strive toward the three perfections: of the painting, of the poem and of the calligraphy. When present, the poem may have been added by someone else, a friend or a later owner of the painting. For example, painting 15_10 by Ma Shouzeng is adorned with a poem by her companion, Wang Zhideng.
Another feature is the frequent presence of seals, those of the painter, but also those of successive owners, always vermilion colored. They also participate in the esthetics of the painting.
Chinese painters have their own way of rendering three-dimensional sceneries. There is usually no vanishing point, where the projections of parallel lines join. Lines that are parallel in reality remain so in the drawing3 (e.g. 15_06). Some landscapes are seen as through a telephoto lens, where perspective is compressed (e.g. 07_03, 22_01). The viewing point can be unexpected : landscapes are often shown from above, and long horizontal scrolls should be looked at from a "travelling point of view", where we look at the part of the scroll in front of us, and not at the whole scroll by turning our head. While in Western paintings nature abhors a vacuum, there is often empty space in Chinese landscape paintings (e.g. 06_03, 15_02, 21_08), and those of birds and flowers have no background.
The techniques of landscape painting have been developed and refined for over two thousand years in China. To understand how elaborate and how intimately connected to calligraphy they are, one can read the book The Tao of Chinese landscape painting - principles and methods by Wucius Wang.
One should keep in mind that these paintings are not necessarily meant to decorate walls; they are often on very long scrolls, thus only occasionally viewed. In the present publications, some such scrolls are displayed as series of separate prints. The scrolls have been recomposed in this page. The painting Along the River During the Qingming Festival is another example of (very) long scroll.
Bibliography
1.
Yu-jen Liu Publishing Chinese Art, Issues of Cultural Reproduction in China, 1905-1918, Trinity College, Oxford, D.Phil. Thesis, Trinity Term 2010,
http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:284f18b9-a0ce-4a4a-bdb4-6a1c1ece44ce↩
2. Maxwell K. Hearn, How to Read Chinese Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008, 173 pages.↩
3. Benjamin March, A note on perspective in Chinese painting, The China Journal, Vol. VII, N.2, August 1927, pp.69-72.
http://library.uoregon.edu/ec/e-asia/read/artpers.pdf↩
4. Laurence Binyon, The flight of the dragon : an essay on the theory and practice of art in China and Japan, based on original sources, Murray, London, 1911, pp.11-13.
https://archive.org/details/flightofdragones00binyuoft/page/10↩
5. Lao Tse, cited in The flight of the dragon, p.33.
https://archive.org/details/flightofdragones00binyuoft/page/33↩