A2 Travel Blog #2

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What are some popular forms of art in China? How do artists express themselves here?

Resource: http://www.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=3753875

China has one of the most ancient continuous artistic traditions in the world. The beginning of Chinese art began at around 5000 B.C. when stone aged people decorated objects of bone, stone, and pottery. The four main popular forms of art in China are figure painting, landscape, calligraphy, decorative objects, and sculptures. The earliest Chinese painting were exquisite, not portrayed and they consisted of mostly patterns or designs. Artists form the Han (202 B.C. - A.D. 220) to the Tang (618-906) Dynasties mainly painted the magnificence of royal life of emperors, palace ladies, and imperial horses that flourished everyone. Figure painting became the elegant realism in the art of court of Southern Tang (937-975). As time goes on, artists then began painting landscapes and painting landscapes is considered as the highest form of Chinese painting. For artists in the North, painting landscapes uses strong black lines, ink wash, and sharp, dotted brushstrokes to suggest rough stone; on the other hand, artists in the South paint peaceful scenes with softer, rubbed brushwork. At first, artists has attempted to paint three dimensional objects to master the illusion of space, but another group of painters created a new kind of art called, "calligraphy". Calligraphy is considered as the highest form of visual arts in China because they showed meaning in writing. The earliest Chinese writing was scratched into pottery, bone, shell, inscribed in clay, or cut into stone; however, new varieties of scripts gave artists more possibilities to create more expressive movements overtime. Today, calligraphy uses brushstrokes and structures of writing for painting. China's materials of Bronze, Jade, and Ceramics are the greatest contributions to world art. Bronze metalwork were turned into bronze shapes and designs to be used to symbolize wealth and status in the Zhou Dynasty (1000's-221 B.C.). Jade was a hard, beautiful stone that was highly valued by the Chinese because they were used to carve ornaments and sculptures of early burial sites. Ceramics were admired world wide by its techniques to be able to produce these ceramics. Sculptures were objects that were made to be buried with the dead to accompany the dead in the spirit world.

The Chinese artists used figure painting to express the royal life of emperors and palace ladies in their time period because Chinese political power is different comparing to other countries, while landscapes expresses the environments that Chinese artists have seen or experienced which is very beautiful in my opinion. Calligraphy written by Chinese artists were used as a very direct form of expression, other Chinese admirers can understand the calligrapher's feelings, tastes, and personal character by looking at his/her own work, and they were also used for ceremonies, decorative purposes, or a flash of inspiration. In my opinion, calligraphy is very inspirational and original because it describes someone or something from beautifully written words which makes you express a proud feeling in yourself when you look back to it. Chinese artists use bronze metalwork to express as symbols of wealth and status, jade was used to express artifacts and history of past burial sites, and ceramics were used to express anything in life,from emperors to nature. Sculptures were used to accompany the dead in the spiritual world; in addition, an example of this would be the tomb of Shi Huangdi, the first emperor of China where 7,000 life-size terra-cotta pottery sculptures of foot soldiers, charioteers, officers, and horses to protect the emperor after death. Therefore, arts and architecture of China by Chinese artists were a symbols towards life and society over the ancient past to modern generations.

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