文化 | Hello China 英文版《你好中国》（15-16）

15 Chinese frescoes (壁画)

Chinese art has a strong tradition of painting and the associated art of calligraphy. One of the earliest forms was the painting of Chinese pottery, as exemplified by the so-called Painted Pottery cultures during the era of Neolithic art, the last phase of the Stone Age. For details, see, for instance, Neolithic Art in China (c.7500-2000 BCE), as well as the Bronze Age period exemplified by Shang Dynasty Art (c.1600-1000 BCE) and Zhou Dynasty Art (1050-221 BCE), whose traditions and practices were handed on to Qin Dynasty Art (221-206 BCE) and Han Dynasty Art (206 BCE - 220 CE), which witnessed the first examples of Chinese porcelain, around 100 CE.

Compared to Western art, Chinese painting is more concerned with water based techniques, rather than oils or acrylics. In addition, Chinese painting is traditionally more stylized, more abstract and less realistic than Western types. It also emphasizes the importance of white space and may be said to favour landscape painting over portrait art, or figure painting.

Traditional Chinese painting ("guo hua") is similar to calligraphy - which itself is considered to be the highest form of painting - and is executed with a brush (made of animal hair) dipped in black ink (made from pine soot and animal glue) or coloured ink. Oils are not generally used. The most popular type of media is paper or silk, but some paintings are done on walls or lacquerwork. The completed artwork may then be mounted on scrolls, which are hung or rolled up. Alternatively, traditional painters may paint directly onto album sheets, walls, Chinese lacquerware, folding screens, and other media. In simple terms, there are two types of "guo hua": the first, known as "Gong-bi" or meticulous-style, is also described as court-style painting; the second, known as "Shui-mo" or "xie yi" or freehand-style, is also called ink and brush painting, or "literati painting", and was practiced by amateur scholar artists.

A great deal of what we know of the ancient art of Chinese painting derives from burial sites from the late Iron Age onwards (c.450 BCE). These tomb paintings were done on silk banners, various lacquered objects, and walls. Their primary function was to protect the dead or assist their souls on their journey to paradise. Tomb painting and sculpture reached its high-point during the Han Dynasty (206 BCE - 220 CE).

Wu Tao-tzu, considered by the Chinese their greatest master, is credited with having added new body and importance to painting in the eighth century. The deliberate slightness and delicate understatement carried into his early work out of tradition gave way to a fuller, more powerful style; the historians speak of astonishing power and majestic largeness. The actual murals and silk paintings are known in description only. Wu Tao-tzu made hundreds of fresco paintings and was celebrated for other Buddhist works as well. From his period the surviving works - not his own, but others that afford information about methods, stylistic changes, changes of standards - are chiefly Buddhist votive pictures, of Bodhisattvas and other near-celestial beings and Paradise, or portraits. In the more complex paintings, done in a hieratic spirit, in the Indian idiom only slightly modified, there are occasional marginal bits - perhaps portraits of donors - which indicate a different, more strictly Chinese style.

Chinese fresco paintings touched a level not surpassed for decorative richness in any other manifestation in the world. The rhythmic adjustment of figures, the vigorous linear interplay, the incomparable Chinese patterning with sensuously seductive colour - all these are to be seen as vitally achieved even in fragmentary compositions. Such is A Vision of Kuan-Yin, a Ming fresco of 1551 in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Fresco painting, method of painting water-based pigments on freshly applied plaster, usually on wall surfaces. The colours, which are made by grinding dry-powder pigments in pure water, dry and set with the plaster to become a permanent part of the wall. Fresco painting is ideal for making murals because it lends itself to a monumental style, is durable, and has a matte surface.

Fresco was practised as early as 2000 BCE by the Minoans during the bronze age civilization of Crete. Famous Cretan buon fresco wall paintings include "The Toreador". Early frescoes were also painted in Morocco and Egypt, with Egyptian artists preferring the secco method for their tomb murals. Fresco paintings were also common in Greek art, as well as Etruscan culture and in Roman art (eg. Pompeii, Herculaneum), where they were mainly executed in buon fresco style. Early Christian art in Rome, notably in the catacombs, also featured fresco murals. Indeed the style was popular with artists throughout the ancient Mediterranean and in Turkey. In addition, early examples of Buddhist fresco art, completed between 200 BCE and 1100 CE, were discovered at the Ajanta caves and the Brihadisvara Temple in India.

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