Page 35 - China, 5000 years : innovation and transformation in the arts

development of various types of body and glaze the past, painters created new pictorial structures
and styles of decoration, each reflecting the
technology and the ethos of its time and its united by innovative grammars. At its best, this
intensely art-historical later painting drew ever-
particular patrons. renewing vitality from the singular vision of each
of its practitioners. But as printed books in the
An almost equally long-lived and practical art is exhibition demonstrate, complex styles could be

calligraphy, which in China had a double nature. Its analyzed, broken down into their constituent parts;
practical uses are readily apparent in the West. But these in turn were often made the hill substance of
in China calligraphy was not simply a tool for
recording; it was the premier art, the badge of later paintings. Such a concentration on details and
rulers and officials, landowners and literati. In on technical features like brushwork ultimately had
China, unlike the Near Eastern and European
Aan adverse affect on the pictorial tradition. similar
— —empires and kingdoms, writing calligraphy was a
emphasis on technology rather than creativity-
key or pass to greatness and station. The proper overtook later Qing dynasty jades, lacquers,
manipulation of ink with brush was the most porcelains, and textiles, and this tendency
constitutes one of the greatest challenges
respected of accomplishments, held to reveal the bequeathed by late dynastic artists to their
moral character of the writer. Calligraphy was also
twentieth-century successors.
a fully aesthetic practice, one with its own tradition,
The reader will by now be aware that this is an
discipline, and criteria of excellence, evolved during
four thousand years of continuous development. exhibition which stresses the art of an ancient
Even without access to the literary meanings, culture with particular relation to innovation and
philosophical assumptions and implications, and creativity. It is not meant to emphasize the

long stylistic history, we in the West may still sense historical, sociological, ethnographical, or literary

the kinesthetic accomplishment of the brush aspects of Chinese culture. But so compelling are
moving across paper or silk. the achievements ot these artists and artisans that
their creations illumine the civilization in which
The use of brush and ink defined the literati class.
—they were produced its material options and
It underlay both calligraphy and painting, the twin
insignia of the civil and civilized life as distinct constraints, its social obligations and expectations,
from its correlative opposite, the military or its moral compulsions and freedoms, its aesthetic
physical life. It is noteworthy too that, in a society preferences and boundaries. These works appear
that generally prized group solidarity over solitary before us as tangible witnesses to China's cultural
genius, individualism in art, the creation of an
individual style, came to be held the highest, most history.

admirable achievement. The paintings in this
exhibition thus manifest a wide range of individual

styles and approaches; they also fall naturally into
two groups, the earlier presenting a more
descriptive, objective view of nature, the later, from
the fourteenth century onward, a more expressive,

subjective approach. From the tenth to the
thirteenth century artists investigated a wide range
of phenomena in the macrocosm of nature. Most it
not all of these phenomena were understood as
embodiments of qualities that existed in the

—microcosm of the human world such things as

mountains, water, bamboo, blossoming plums,
chrysanthemums, and orchids functioned as
emblems for qualities associated with the ideal

—scholar-gentleman but reality, although pervaded

with moral and metaphysical and auspicious
meanings, was still granted an objective existence
outside the mind that sought to apprehend it and
that endowed it with those meanings.

During the Yuan and later dynasties artists tended

to move away from direct engagement with outer

— —reality even that defined in idealistic terms and

to create more subjective works. Often using a

stylistic and technical syllabary derived fiom art oi

INTRODUCTION 33