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Chinese Painting
By Wu Hong
Shanghai People's Publishing House 2022
Recently, the famous art historian Wu Hong's latest book "Chinese Painting: Ancient to Tang" was published by Wenjing. This book is born out of the chapter "Paleolithic Period to Tang Dynasty" written by the author in "Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting", which reorganizes the structural framework, supplements the latest research results, and comprehensively describes the development of early Chinese painting from ancient times to the end of the Tang Dynasty, and the styles and characteristics of painting in different eras. In this book, the author consciously breaks through the scope of scroll painting, expands the concept of "Chinese painting", and includes faience, murals, screens, stickers and other types of paintings in materials, with his keen image analysis ability to fully understand the archaeological achievements of China in the past hundred years, change the existing narrative mode of painting history, and present the inner connection between different images in different eras and different planes.
From mysterious images on rocks to pottery, ornaments and frescoes on architecture, how do the two-dimensional planes of painting come about?
From the stork stone axe on the clay urn to the spatial picture of the overlapping of the figures and time and space on the painted lacquer box, how did the realistic painting of the surface of the artifact trigger the independence of the portrait?
How did the first pictorial climax of the Chu Han tomb ritual art unfold in connection with the flourishing development of Buddhist murals and scroll paintings in later generations?
How did the competition between the court art and the extremely prosperous public religious art between the government and the opposition shape the atmosphere of the Tang Dynasty full of changes and novelty?
In the three-thousand-year long history of Chinese painting, early painting with the end of the Tang Dynasty as the node shouldered the grand historical responsibility of developing painting media, and the collective creation of anonymous painters played an important role in daily life and religious and ceremonial environments, unlike scroll paintings as the bulk of later paintings, archaeological materials reflected in different periods, regions and painters' style changes, making this painting history have a unique character in research methods.
What is early Chinese painting
Text | Wu Hong
Source | Foreword to Chinese Painting: Ancient to Tang Dynasty
In general understanding, "early Chinese painting" corresponds to "late Chinese painting", referring to the early stage of development after the birth of Chinese painting. This idea can be said to be neither right nor wrong. "Right" is because early painting and late painting do have a temporal and connotative inheritance relationship, and are part of the overall history of Chinese painting. "Wrong" is due to the fact that this understanding often implies an evolutionary concept that equates "early" with primitive and underdeveloped stages in the history of painting, to be evolved and sublimated into a higher form of artistic expression. But if we carefully reflect on the development of fine arts, we will find that this is not entirely the case: imagine the bronzes of the Shang and Zhou Dynasties or the sculptures of the Southern and Northern Dynasties to the Tang Dynasty, and the history of Chinese art has never produced similar works of equal glory since then. There are many similar examples, which of course do not mean that human artistic creativity has shrunk or regressed, but that art in different epochs has its own objects, characters, and conditions, and that the achievements achieved cannot be measured according to a single concept of "evolution."
Thinking about early Chinese painting according to this principle, although it has an inevitable continuity with later painting, its subject, purpose and creative environment all have their own characteristics. These characteristics can be summarized into three major aspects, which are essentially related to the function, form, creator and research method of painting art.
Inner page of Chinese Painting
The first is its historical subject or task. If late painting focuses more on the conscious exploration of pictorial style, then early painting bears a more basic and grand historical responsibility, that is, the discovery and invention of the painting medium itself, resulting in the endless art form of painting. As will be reviewed in the first section of this book, human beings do not have the most basic conditions for painting from the beginning, that is, the "plane" that carries images. This plane emerged in the course of the development of human civilization, and then there was a pictorial expression composed of two-dimensional images. Numerous studies have shown that the plane of painting first appeared on the surface of utensils and buildings, both in China and other parts of the world, and that the independent painting plane was another major development thousands of years later, with movable paintings that distinguished them from architecture and artifacts. This kind of independent painting has gone through a process of more than a thousand years from birth to maturity, during which various styles such as hand scrolls, screens, painting curtains, and vertical scrolls have been developed. The history of early Chinese painting has witnessed the emergence and development of these painting media on the one hand, and on the other hand, it has also continuously reflected the continuous interaction between these independent forms of painting and architectural and artifact paintings: we read in ancient art history works such as "Famous Paintings of Past Dynasties" that even in the Tang Dynasty, where scroll painting was already quite developed, outstanding painters still created a large number of temples and palace murals, and interior furnishings such as barriers were still an important medium for their paintings. It was only after the Tang Dynasty that independent paintings such as scrolls and albums became a major part of painting, and the internal mechanism of painting creation also underwent major changes.
Furthermore, from the perspective of the function of painting and the identity of the painter, early and late Chinese painting also have essential differences. This book defines the scope of early painting from prehistory to the Tang Dynasty, and for most of the thousands of years the painters were unknown painters, and in most cases we don't even know their names. In fact, rather than calling them "painters" according to later customs, they were called craftsmen; their works were mostly collectively completed rather than individually created independently. Equally important, during this period, painting was inseparable from religion, politics and everyday life. Although we now refer to the pictorial images obtained through archaeological excavations as "paintings", these works— either the portrait decorations on utensils or the frescoes on the buildings— were of use value at the time and were part of the environment of daily life and religious etiquette. The understanding of these images must therefore be linked to the cultural practices of the time, and their meaning and function are often impossible to talk about if they are divorced from the original environment or "context". From this perspective, modern art galleries are often misleading: when tombs and palace frescoes are removed from their original environment and placed in glass display cases as independent paintings, their original connection to their creators and viewers is blurred.
This situation changed significantly in the late stage of the "early painting" stage, that is, after the Wei and Jin dynasties and the Northern and Southern Dynasties. According to historical records, independent painters of literati origin appeared during this period, and their works began to take the form of portable scrolls. These new paintings are not only the product of the entire social culture, but also the crystallization of personal thoughts and tastes. When studying these works, we need not only to understand their cultural environment and ideological background, but also to explore the personal life and experience of the painter. We will find that although living in the same social environment and ideological currents, different artists often respond in very different ways of expression. This situation is shown more clearly in Tang Dynasty painting, and there is a transition to later painting. The discussion of Tang dynasty painters in this book will therefore deal more with the artist's social status, educational background, personal style and artistic ambitions, as well as the formation of different schools of painting.
The third feature of early painting was related to the conditions of study and the sources of information. Although we know from the literature that many famous painters have appeared since the Wei and Jin Dynasties, and the history of painting has retained the titles of many of their works, these works were completely lost in the subsequent social unrest. Today, when we read the Tang Dynasty art historian Zhang Yanyuan (c. 815-c. 877) on the early painting collection and its repeated losses, we still have a sense of regret:
Han Wu created a secret cabinet to gather books; Han Ming Ya good Dan Qing, don't open a studio. He also founded Hongdu Xue, in order to collect strange arts and gather the art of the world. And Dong Zhuo's rebellion, the westward migration of Shanyang, the pictures and paintings, the soldiers were all taken as porches, and the west was more than seventy times. In the rain, half of them are abandoned. The Wei and Jin dynasties guduo hid, hu kou entered Luo, and burned for a while. Song, Qi, Liang, Chen Zhijun, Ya has a good shang. Jin was destroyed by Liu Yao, and many were destroyed. Heavy on Huan Xuan, sexual greed and curiosity, the world's law books and paintings, will be returned to themselves. and Xuan usurpation, the true deeds of the Jin Dynasty, and the xuan-do-it... Xuan was defeated, and Song Gao's ancestors made Zang Xi enter the palace. Southern Qi Gao Di Ke Qi is a particularly refined person, a famous player in ancient times, not close and far, but bad or bad. From Lu Tanwei to Fan Weixian, forty-two people are forty-second rank, twenty-seven ranks, and three hundred and forty-eight volumes. In addition to listening to politics, playing day and night. Emperor Wu of Liang was still more searchable. Yuan Diya is talented and self-reliant. Ancient treasures, filled with the inner house. During Hou Jing's rebellion, Prince Gang counted the dreams of the Qin Emperor and wanted to burn the book of the world, and even though the Inner House drew hundreds of letters, it was burned by Jing. And Jing Zhiping, all the paintings are loaded in Jiangling, which was trapped by the Western Wei Dynasty. Emperor Yuan will descend, and 240,000 volumes of famous paintings, legal books and classics will be sent to gao shanbao, a descendant of the Cabinet, to burn them...
From this point of view, since the Han Dynasty, successive kings have spent a lot of energy and material resources searching for ancient and modern famous paintings and appropriating them for themselves, but in fact they are constantly preparing conditions for the collective destruction of these works. As a result, early scroll paintings from the Wei and Jin dynasties to the Tang Dynasty are rare, if still exist, and facsimiles are often mixed with the style and interest of later generations, and cannot be used as a reliable basis for studying the history of early painting. Thankfully, ancient China had a long tradition of drawing burial chambers, in which the exquisite ones may even have been written by famous artists of the time. Through nearly five decades of continuous archaeological excavations, we have accumulated a large number of important burial chamber murals and stone carvings closely related to the art of painting, reflecting the changes in the style of different periods, regions and painters. Although these murals and stone carvings cannot be equated with hand-scrolled paintings because of their material form and ceremonial function, the trajectory they reflect provides an extremely valuable reference for the study of early Chinese painting. The study of the history of painting based on these archaeological materials is different from the study of the history of painting based on scroll painting in terms of evidentiary nature and analysis procedures, which makes this period of painting history have a unique character in terms of research methods.
The reason why we put the time range of "early Chinese painting" to the end of the Tang Dynasty is based on these three characteristics. After this, scroll painting gradually became a major part of painting creation, frescoes and line portraits took a back seat; the establishment of schools and personal styles became the main events in the history of painting, and the interaction between literati painters, court painters and professional painters became an important mechanism for determining the direction of painting styles; and a large number of authentic works existed in public and private collections, providing the main material for the study of painting history. These characteristics constitute the characteristics of Chinese painting after the 10th century and the new conditions for its study.