Chinese Empire

Chinese Visual Arts: Painting, Calligraphy, Ceramics, and More

Imperial China produced one of the great visual traditions of human history. From the bronze ritual vessels of the Shang and Zhou, to the ink landscapes of the Southern Song and Yuan, to the blue-and-white porcelain of the Ming, to the carved jade of the Qing court, the visual arts of imperial China were technically refined, deeply philosophical, and produced in extraordinary quantity. They were also unusually well integrated: a finished literati painting was expected to bear a poem in beautiful running script, a seal, and a signature, and the work was complete only when word, image, and calligraphic gesture were all present. To understand Chinese visual art is to understand a system in which painting, calligraphy, poetry, and the decorative arts were all branches of the same discipline.

This article offers a survey of the Chinese visual arts across the imperial period, from the Qin unification in 221 BCE to the fall of the Qing in 1912. It traces the two great traditions of painting — the literati school and the court school — and the development of the major genres: landscape, bird-and-flower, figure painting, and Buddhist and Daoist religious art. It examines calligraphy as a visual and philosophical practice. It surveys ceramics, from Tang sancai to Qing famille rose. It looks at bronze, jade, lacquer, and textile arts. For a deeper look at two of the most important individual traditions, see our surveys of Chinese calligraphy and Chinese porcelain. The visual arts sit within the broader context of Chinese art, culture, and society and the literary tradition of imperial China.

Painting

Chinese painting is one of the great traditions of world art. The medium — ink and colour on silk or paper — was unforgiving, the technique took decades to master, and the philosophical depth of the greatest works is comparable to that of the great Western religious paintings.

The Two Traditions: Literati and Court

From the Song dynasty onwards, the Chinese painting world was divided into two great camps, the literati (文人, wénrén) painters and the court (院畫, yuànhuà) painters. The literati painters were scholar-officials who painted for their own pleasure and for the appreciation of a small circle of like-minded friends. They preferred monochrome ink, landscape, plum blossoms, bamboo, orchids, chrysanthemums, and a deliberately rough, amateurish brushwork that signalled moral sincerity. The court painters were professionals employed by the imperial household, who produced meticulous, brightly coloured pictures of horses, birds, imperial processions, palace scenes, and historical or mythological subjects. The two traditions were never completely separate — court painters sometimes adopted literati techniques, and literati painters sometimes accepted imperial patronage — but the tension between them defined the history of Chinese painting.

The Song Academy

The Northern Song court academy, especially under the Emperor Huizong (r. 1100–1125), produced some of the most refined court paintings in Chinese history. Huizong was himself a great painter, calligrapher, and connoisseur, and he established a court painting academy that brought together the finest artists of the day. The famous A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains (千里江山圖), a Song blue-and-green landscape masterpiece now in the Palace Museum in Beijing, dates from this period. The Along the River During the Qingming Festival (清明上河圖) by Zhang Zeduan, depicting the bustle of the Northern Song capital Kaifeng, is the most famous Chinese painting of any period.

The Southern Song and the One-Corner Ma, Half-Side Xia

After the fall of the Northern Song to the Jurchen Jin in 1127, the court retreated south to Hangzhou and founded the Southern Song (1127–1279). The Southern Song court painters, especially Ma Yuan and Xia Gui, developed the famous “one-corner Ma, half-side Xia” composition: a vast empty space, often a lake or river mist, with a small but striking focus in one corner of the picture. The technique was both a formal innovation and an emotional statement — a new, more intimate, more melancholy style for a court that had lost the north.

The Yuan Four Masters

The Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) saw the Mongol conquest of the Southern Song, and many former Southern Song officials refused to serve the new dynasty. Several turned to painting as a way of preserving the old culture. The four painters now known as the Four Masters of the Yuan — Huang Gongwang, Wu Zhen, Ni Zan, and Wang Meng — produced landscapes of extraordinary depth and personal feeling. Huang Gongwang’s Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (富春山居圖), a long handscroll painted over several years in the mid-fourteenth century, is one of the supreme masterpieces of East Asian painting. The Yuan painters’ preference for ink over colour, for personal expression over courtly decorum, set the pattern for the literati tradition for the next four hundred years.

The Ming and the Wu School

The Ming dynasty (1368–1644) saw a split in the literati tradition. The Zhe School of professional painters, led by Dai Jin and later the wildly individual Wu Wei, painted in a vigorous, expressive style close to Southern Song academic models. The Wu School, based in the Suzhou area and led by Shen Zhou, Wen Zhengming, Tang Yin, and Qiu Ying, returned to the Yuan literati tradition of monochrome ink and personal expression. The Wu School painters, especially Shen Zhou and Wen Zhengming, were the model of the cultivated literati painter for the rest of the imperial period.

The Early Qing and the Individualists

The early Qing (1644–c. 1750) was the great age of the individualist masters. After the Manchu conquest, several major painters refused to serve the new dynasty and became Buddhist or Daoist monks, painting under religious names. The Four Wangs — Wang Shimin, Wang Jian, Wang Hui, and Wang Yuanqi — continued the orthodox literati tradition in an elaborate, allusive manner. The “Four Monk Painters” — Shitao (also known as Yuanji), Bada Shanren (Zhu Da), Hongren, and Kuncan — developed a much more personal, often strange and emotional style. Shitao’s Peach Blossom Spring paintings, Bada Shanren’s haunted birds and fish, and Hongren’s stark landscapes are among the supreme works of Chinese art.

Calligraphy

Calligraphy was the most respected of all Chinese visual arts, considered by many the most profound. A great calligrapher was honoured more than a great painter, and a high official who wrote well was expected to display his calligraphy in the public halls of his office. The full story of the scripts, the great calligraphers, and the aesthetic theory see Chinese calligraphy.

Ceramics and Porcelain

Chinese ceramics are the most famous Chinese contribution to world material culture, and they were the single most important Chinese export for most of the imperial period. The full story of their development see Chinese porcelain.

The key periods in Chinese ceramic history can be summarised briefly. The Tang sancai (三彩) wares of the seventh to ninth centuries were lead-glazed, three-colour earthenware horses, camels, and tomb figurines that have become icons of Tang taste. The Song dynasty (960–1279) refined monochrome wares to a level that has never been surpassed: the jade-green celadons of Longquan, the pale celadons of Ru, the ivory-toned Ding wares, the dark Jian tea bowls, and the refined Guan and Ge wares of the Southern Song court. The Ming dynasty saw the rise of the imperial kilns at Jingdezhen in Jiangxi and the world-famous blue-and-white (青花, qīnghuā) wares, decorated with cobalt blue under a clear glaze. The Qing dynasty added the famille rose and famille verte enamelled wares, the flamboyant falangcai (foreign colour) wares, and the elaborate doucai (joined colour) wares, all produced in astonishing quantities for the imperial household and for export to Europe.

Bronze Vessels

The bronze ritual vessels of the Shang and Zhou, the great bronzes that entered the British and American museums in the nineteenth century, were originally the supreme status objects of the Chinese elite. They were used in ancestral rites, in state ceremonies, and as treasures passed down within aristocratic families. By the Han dynasty, the production of new ritual bronzes had largely ceased, and the surviving Zhou bronzes were treasured antiques. Later dynasties collected them, copied them, and used them as inspiration. The Song dynasty in particular saw a wave of imperial antiquarianism: the Emperor Huizong compiled catalogues of his collection, and Song craftsmen produced fakes of Zhou bronzes that are now, themselves, treasures.

Jade

Jade (玉, yù) carving is the oldest continuous Chinese art tradition. Neolithic Hongshan and Liangzhu cultures of the fifth to third millennia BCE produced elaborate jade dragons, cong tubes, and bi discs whose function is still debated. By the Han dynasty, jade carving was a major imperial industry, and the Han princes were buried in jade suits sewn with gold wire in the belief that jade would preserve the body. Ming and Qing jade carving reached new heights of technical refinement: large boulders of jade from Burma were carved into mountain scenes, vases, and figures, often decorated with delicate openwork. The Qianlong Emperor in particular was an obsessive jade collector, and many of the finest surviving jades date from his reign (1735–1796).

Lacquerware

Lacquerware — objects made by applying multiple layers of tree-sap lacquer to a wooden or fabric body, often with carved decoration — was another major Chinese tradition. The most famous style is the carved red lacquer (剔紅, tīhóng) of the Ming dynasty, in which dozens of layers of cinnabar-coloured lacquer were applied to a body and then carved into elaborate designs of dragons, phoenixes, flowers, or landscape scenes. The Yongle and Xuande reigns of the early Ming saw the height of the technique, and the imperial lacquer workshops of Beijing produced a steady stream of dishes, boxes, and vases for the court. Lacquerware was also a major export, with Chinese lacquer appearing in the inventories of European aristocrats from the seventeenth century onwards.

Textiles and Silk

Silk was, along with porcelain and tea, one of the three great Chinese exports across the imperial period. Chinese silk weaving reached extraordinary technical heights: the kesi (緙絲, “cut silk”) tapestry technique, in which coloured silk threads were wound on small shuttles and woven to produce a pattern that looked like painting, was developed in the Tang and reached its highest point in the Song. The Song empresses and court ladies produced some of the most famous kesi, including the “Lotus Ducks” handscroll attributed to the emperor Huizong. The Ming and Qing courts supported imperial textile workshops that produced silks for the emperor, the imperial family, the officials, and tribute gifts. The dragon robes of the Qing emperors, woven with nine five-clawed dragons in gold thread on a yellow background, were the most elaborate silk products ever made.

Other Decorative Arts

A few other decorative arts deserve brief mention. Cloisonné (景泰藍, jǐngtài lán), the technique of firing coloured enamel into metal cells soldered to a metal body, was refined in the Ming and Qing, with the most famous pieces dating to the Jingtai reign of the Ming (1450–1456). Furniture — particularly the hardwood furniture of the Ming and Qing — is now recognised as a major art form, with the elegant lines of Ming huanghuali and zitan furniture setting a standard that modern designers have struggled to match. Snuff bottles (鼻煙壺, bíyānhú), small glass, porcelain, jade, or lacquer vessels for holding powdered tobacco, became a Qing imperial speciality and were produced in astonishing variety. The minor arts of the imperial court — fans, paper cuts, kites, embroideries, and so on — are too numerous to catalogue, but they show the same technical refinement and aesthetic ambition that characterise the greater arts.

The Materials and the Market

The visual arts were produced for two main markets: the imperial court, which maintained imperial workshops in the Forbidden City and at the porcelain kilns of Jingdezhen, and the private market, which was especially important in the Ming and Qing. The late Ming saw the rise of wealthy merchant collectors in the Jiangnan cities — Suzhou, Hangzhou, Yangzhou, Nanjing — who competed to acquire paintings, calligraphy, antiques, and curios. The great collectors of the late Ming, like the Xiang Yuanbian or the Dong Qichang, established collections and catalogues that became legendary. The Qing, with its even larger urban elite, supported a market for paintings, calligraphy, and antiques that was larger and more active than ever before.

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