Thread by @culturaltutor

Over 1,000 years ago, it was the closest painting has ever come to poetry...

An introduction to traditional Chinese landscape art:

This form of Chinese art arose during the 6th century and later flourished under the Song, Liao, Jin and Yuan dynasties (907–1368).

And, unlike art in the ancient world and in Medieval Europe, landscape paintings were regarded as the highest form of art.

Orson Welles said that "the enemy of creativity is a lack of restrictions."

He was right. The narrower your scope of options, the more you do with them.

Chinese art in this era was usually nothing more than ink on silk, a method known as inkwash, and therefore monochrome.

Why landscapes, then? While Gothic art in Europe was all about conveying the stories and messages of the Bible to people who couldn't read (beautiful art in its own right) traditional Chinese art was quite different.

And it has a lot to do with philosophy.

Taoism, Buddhism, and neo-Confucianism all drew artists to consider the natural world as the ultimate subject for art.

They sought to depict the smallness of mankind in comparison with the world, and to explore the patterns and principles which underlay the entire cosmos.

So these artists weren't just painters, they were also philosophers.

And they weren't interested in realistic depictions of the world, nor in conveying messages and stories, but in exploring what they *thought* about reality.

What was its mood, atmosphere, and essence?

This is clearly not what the mountains observed by Guo Xi actually looked like.

And though they are recognisably mountains, they take on an ethereal form. They are vast, inscrutable, almost divine, as they loom over the tiny buildings in the right-centre of the painting.

So if these landscape paintings don't tell religious or historical stories, and if they are neither decorative nor exist to capture a realistic depiction of reality, what are they?

They are works of artistic philosophy.

And many of these artists were poets, too.

Modern western ideas don't quite convey the syncretism of Chinese teaching at that time: religion, philosophy, poetry, and painting were not so distinct to these artists as they may sometimes seem to us.

Indeed, these paintings often feature a few lines of poetry.

The artist would write down their meditations in verse on the landscape itself, as if part of it.

Clearly these artists weren't just thinkers. They were also technical masters who trained for a long time to understand the skill of inkwash.

And they trained specifically to paint each element of the landscape, from trees to rivers to fog. Hence, I think, their elegance.

They would also meditate on the meaning of these things, searching for their essence and underlying qualities.

Such focus on each element led the artists to paint them with reverence, care, and clarity.

So when time finally came to paint, the artist would be struck by a vision of the natural world and, using the hard-earned skills of his craft, as if by second nature, capture its essence and mood in inkwash.

Years of practice and thinking led to a harmonious creative process.

This explains their striking and quite beautiful simplicity.

There wasn't space to worry *too much* about composition or shape or perspective or any other problems that might arise.

They observed, felt, contemplated, and let their mind guide the brush.

And this sometimes resulted in rather unusual images where much of the silk is empty, perhaps fog or ocean or... something else?

As for their disinterest in realistic depictions, consider this closeup.

It is remarkable with how few brush-strokes Ma Yuan was able to conjure up such a striking image of trees, mountains, and roofs.

Some of them are reminiscent of 20th works of art in their disregard for realism and focus on expression and even slightly surreal humour:

Of course, these Chinese painters were deeply aware of composition, colour, perspective, and shape.

Xie He's 5th century guide to painting discusses them all, and you will have noticed careful consideration of each in all these works of art.

The result is quite miraculous.

These paintings are unpretentious but not vulgar and simple but not abstract.

And they possess that meditative, contemplative, essential quality with which the artists wished to imbue them.

You can study these ostensibly simple works of art for a very long time without getting bored.

Unlike some art, in which you can feel the artists *trying* to do something new, exciting, or difficult, these landscape paintings have a simple harmony, grace, and ease.

There is plenty they *don't* do, which other art does, but they aren't trying to do those things.

We end with a truly beautiful work art.

As with all great art, however, it is more than just beautiful. Regardless of what it's creator intended, it seems to have a purpose and a meaning. It stays with you and, somehow, changes you.

That is a brief overview - with many details missed - of traditional Chinese landscape art.

It is a reminder that "art" can be many different things, even in how we fundamentally conceptualise it.

Has any age of painting ever come closer to philosophy and poetry than this?