China Popular Itineraries |
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Chinese Ancient Landscape Painting |
Landscape painting is the type of traditional Chinese painting that aims to portray all natural landscape, including famous mountains and rivers, scenic beauty and spots, fields and villages, buildings, boats, bridges, and city gar-dens, etc. It not only creates rich and colorful natural landscapes but also em-bodies the Chinese people's conception of nature, their aesthetic awareness, their wisdom and sentiment ; moreover, it establishes the aesthetic standards d oriental art. It is a vivid manifestation of culture of traditional Chinese ideolo-gy.
Chinese ancient landscape painting went beyond passively copying na-ture. Undoubtedly it showed much interest in the discovery and depiction d objects of beauty. But it also tried to preserve the painter' s understanding and perception of the whole natural world, his thought and emotion, ideal and de-sire into this limited picturesque scene. To create "artistic conception" is the special tradition of the Chinese landscape painting, that is, to seek an unity d the form and spirit, to realize an unity of feeling and the natural setting through an emphasis on expressing the painter's thought and feelings. Land-scape paintings appeal to viewers by the creative composition that results in "meaning beyond the picture and picture beyond the meaning. " What the Chinese landscape painting expresses is a dialectical relationship between sub-jectivity and objectivity; and what Chinese landscape painting builds is a scene where man and nature, feelings and settings are in harmony.
Chinese landscape painting follows the principle that "nature is the source of artistic imagination and creation. " The essence of the principle is to read amply and travel widely, to blend one's understanding and feeling of the na-ture with the sum and total of the social life which ferment in one's breast till one gets an obstinate and concrete image; then get down to painting, using the two methods of composition: landscape painting and vision creation. To paint a landscape is to confine one's feeling to the exciting scenes with more emphasis on the existence of concrete objects for appreciation. The landscape paintings of the Sui and the Tang dynasties, the Five Dynasties and the Two Songs Period are typical of Chinese ancient painting art characterized by har-mony between nature and man, uniformity of poetry and painting, as well as a blending of emotion with scenery. |
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