1 What is Traditional Chinese Painting?

Traditional Chinese painting is China's traditional art with unique national characteristics. It uses brush, ink stick, ink slab,paper and pigment to depict both realistic and imaginary Objects. Since it uses mainly water and ink to paint on paper, it is also called ink-and-wash painting. With its unique technique and style, it forms anindependent art in the world, on a par with oil painting in the West.

Traditional Chinese painting can be traced back to the primitive society of five thousand years ago. The superb linear art appearing on protoceramic objects represents the embryo of traditional Chinese painting. Later, after constant innovation and development over several thousand years, today's brilliant era of traditional Chinese painting came into being.

Traditional Chinese painting pays great attention to presenting the essence of objects, stressing the beauty of form and requiring pictures to "capture both spirit  and form" and to "be replete with vitality and rhythm." Moreover, it emphasizes the  organic combination of literature, calligraphy, seal engraving and painting. All traditional Chinese painting blends poetry, calligraphy, painting and seal engraving into one indivisible artistic whole.

2. Form and Content of Traditional Chinese Painting

 The principal forms of traditional Chinese painting are hanging scroll, album of paintings, fan an album of paintings the artist paints on a certain size of xuan paper, then binds a number of paintings into an album, convenient for storage.The surface of both folding fans and round fans is painted. Before people had electric fans or air-conditioning, they used fans made of bamboo strips pasted with paper or silk. Artists painted the fan's surface as recreation. In time this developed into a form of painting that has been handed down to the present. Folding fans, usually made of paper, are used by men, while round fans, generally of silk, are used by women. When artists paint on the silk, the fan appears fine and elegant. The long horizontal scroll is also called a hand scroll.It is less than fifty centimetres high, but several to a hundred metres long. Pictures on long horizontal scrolls are not restricted as to time, whether seasons or decades. A hundred or a thousand human figures can be portrayed in one painting. After being mounted, it can be appreciated section by section. Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival (Qingming Festival, when Chinese people visit ancestral tombs, falls on April 5 or 6 each year) is a famous horizontal scroll from the Song Dynasty (960--1279). The painting is 52.5 centimetres long.

Traditional Chinese paintings can be classified according to subject matter into figure paintings, landscapes and flower-and-bird paintings. Landscapes represent a major category in traditional Chinese painting, mainly depicting the natural  scenery of mountains and rivers.