Chinese painting uses special brushes dipped in water, ink, and colors to paint on silk or rice paper. These materials represent the "Four Treasures of the Scholar's Studio" (文房四宝 Wénfángsìbǎo):
◯ Calligraphy brush (毛笔 máobǐ)
◯ Ink stick (墨 mò)
◯ Rice paper (宣纸 xuānzhǐ)
◯ Inkstone, an inkwell where the solid ink is ground (砚台 yàntái)
If Chinese painting is classified based on subjects, it can be divided into figure painting, landscapes, flowers and birds, animals, and insects. Traditional Chinese painting can also be classified based on expressive techniques, such as figurative painting (具象 jùxiàng) and freehand brushwork (写意 xiěyì), calligraphy (书法 shūfǎ), etc. Chinese painting even combines with the art of poetry.
Chinese painting is an ageless art, which favors nature, contemplating nature's forms to reveal the mystery of existence. The elegant simplicity of the brush strokes, a visual meditation that becomes lyric poetry; “Poetry is painting and painting is poetry”, this has always been
the ideal, made even more explicit by the presence on the painting of a calligraphic passage: a verse composed by the artist or lines from classic poems .
The ideograms themselves, in their elegant forms, become pictorial art: let's not forget that the ideogram is not a simple conventional sign, it was born as the stylized drawing of a real thing and it aims at grasping the essence of things.
The brush dances on the rice paper: a ritual that has drawn the inexhaustible richness of the human soul on paper for millennia.
"The painting is subject to ink, the ink is subject to the brush, the brush is subject to the wrist, and the wrist is subject to the heart" (ShiTao 1642-1718).
From a thematic point of view, traditional Chinese painting can be classified into three categories:
◯ 中国山水画 Chinese Landscape Painting
◯ 中国花鸟画 Chinese Flower Painting
◯ 中国人物画 Chinese Figure Painting
