Selected Chinese Paintings by Sun Tianmu

Author: Sun Tianmu
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-01-01
Features: Chinese painting, a tradition with a very long history. Today, it can be seen on silk fabrics from the Warring States period with brushwork and line drawing, as well as rich and colorful dyeing. This excellent tradition, known as "responding to objects and shaping forms, and assigning colors according to categories," could not have suddenly emerged as a technique in the early Western Han Dynasty. Tracing it back, it can be imagined that it took more than a thousand years to become the great cultural tradition of the great Chinese nation. Due to the corruption of the feudal system, the people developed a hatred for the political system and urgently desired reform, which led them to resent all traditional cultural arts. However, black hair and yellow skin could not be easily changed, and even if they were turned into blond and white-skinned, they could not fully catch up with the West in natural sciences and living systems. Moreover, cultural arts could not change overnight with the feudal political system. The style of cultural arts also emerged into small schools due to the differences among the authors. For example, in the Tang and Song dynasties, there were two major schools within the grand tradition: one with meticulous and refined brushwork, and the other with simpler brushwork. In the late Ming Dynasty, Dong Qichang, a calligrapher, categorized the meticulous landscape painting style of the Tang and Song dynasties as the Northern School and referred to the expressive landscape painting style of the Song and Yuan literati as the Southern School. Dong Qichang himself identified with the Southern School but wrote a specialized paper praising the Northern School.