Oriental Art

Oriental Art

Oriental Art is very unique and interesting. It is based on life all around them, nature.

In Hsuan-ho hua pu classifies paintings in ten groups:

„h Taoist and Buddhist (tao shih)

„h Human affairs (jen wu)

„h Places and other buildings (kung shih)

„h Foreign tribes (fan tsu)

„h Dragons and fishes (lung yu)

„h Landscapes (shan shui)

„h Animals (chu shou)

„h Flowers and birds (hua niao)

„h Ink Bamboos (mo chu)

„h Vegetables and fruits (su kuo)

This religious art, including portrayals of gods, stands at the head of the list and is followed by a group of paintings including portraits of legendary heroes. Group three and four also relate to men, while group five includes that fountainhead of moral virtue, the dragon. However the didactic value of the remaining categories is less apparent, and for this reason they occupy the lower half of the list.

The category of Chinese painting called flowers and birds (hua niao) is to some extent cognate with European still-life painting in subject matter, yet spiritually the two have little or nothing in common. In China especially, this trait long outlived the primitive stage of human culture completely sophisticated form of picture- making. As a result, the tradition of Sung Chinese flower-and-bird painting made itself felt though out Asia.

Among the Chinese themselves, flower-and-bird painting is a major form of pictorial expression, which for thousands of years has exercise their aesthetic imagination to extent comparable with, say, our European nude.

Assembly of Birds can best be described in Rowland¡¦s words ¡V a habitat group with a painted black cloth. For despite the beauty of its execution, it is as airless as a showcase in some provincial museum of natural history, in which someone has attempted to provide, for its palpably moribund occupants, a realistic setting of seashore, marsh, or tropical savannah.

Paintings of bamboos are entered under the heading mo chu, or ¡¥ink bamboo¡¦. This term does not only mean bamboo painting done solely in monochrome ink; it also implies that brush and ink are used in recognizably calligraphic way, and not merely to build up forms by describing boundary lines. Paintings of bamboo done by means of outline (kou li) were not admitted as a separate category in Chinese painting; nor, theoretically at least, can be classified as mo chu.

A piece of bamboo has objective existence as a percept before it has been painted, whereas a written character has none.