Painting

The traditional Chinese painting style is known as guohua, or “national painting,” to distinguish it from the styles prominent in other countries. This is the result of thousands of years of artistic evolution; Chinese painting is one art forms of any culture in the world. Traditionally paintings use ink and brushes and only in the modern era did China start using oils, a technique imported from abroad.


Main Styles

There are two main styles of traditional Chinese paintings. Gongbi is known as the style popular in the imperial court. Gongbi paintings focus on fine, detailed brushstrokes. Lines bring life and form to the paintings. This style seeks to include details and imitate as close to real life as possible. Baimao is a type of gongbi that uses only black ink to draw outlines and contours of the subject.

Xieyi, another style, is also known as  freehand style. Unlike gongbi, this style does not seek to strictly reflect reality. Ancient artists believed that a painting should reflect how an artist sees an object, in addition to its actual appearance. The word "xieyi" means to "write to idea," and this style emphasizes the artists perceptions and thoughts as much as the actual form of what is being reflected. Proportion, light and perspective are all secondary to the artist’s personal conception of what an object is.

Xieyi paintings are not limited to a single focal point or perspective. A typical painting of this style has a “flowing” style: by ignoring proportion and perspective, the artist shows many different focuses in one piece. Shuimo is a subset of xieyi and only allows the use of black ink.


Subjects for Paintings

Traditional subjects for paintings include landscapes, human figures as well as birds and flowers. Landscapes often fall into the shanshui (“mountains and water”) category. Rivers, mountains, hills and waterfalls often figure prominently. These types of landscape paintings do not represent what the artist has seen in nature; instead, they reflect the artist’s thinking about nature.

To qualify as a true shanshui painting and not merely a landscape painting, a piece must fulfil certain requirements. Paths in the hills and mountains should be winding and crooked, to mimic a natural trail. In turn, paths should always lead to a threshold, either at the foot or top of a mountain, to clearly define the mountain’s boundary. Finally, all shanshui paintings must include a heart – a focus which gives the piece meaning and to which all other elements lead (though not necessarily the center of the painting).

Figure paintings focus on human beings and have many categories. Various categories exist, including Taoist, Buddhist, female portraits and historical figures. The goal of a figure painting is to reflect actual physical appearance as well as a persons attitude, outlook and spirit.

Bird and flower paintings incorporate symbolism to add meaning into the piece. For example, a pine tree represents moral correctness and long life. Orchids suggest virtue and purity. Other plants and types of animals have special meaning to those familiar with this type of painting.
 

Regardless of the subject, poetry plays an important part in poetry. Pieces are often painted to match a poem or vice versa. These are usually short poems and can be written somewhere on the painting itself. The script is usually written in a calligraphy script, and these two art forms are vitally linked in China.