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Qi Baishi         齊白石
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The Art of Traditional Chinese Painting Continued

 
For example, no over effort is made to represent the shadows cast by a particular type of lighting at a certain place and time in the clothing on people depicted in the Sung dynasty painting Che K'an T'u, and for this reason the painting does not have a clear three-dimensional effect. After the painter set the lines down on the paper, he used watercolor wash techniques to achieve a chiaroscuro effect of light and dark, representing the forces of "yin" and "yang", to express his grasp of the eternal quintessential nature of of his subject. A square planter painted according to the objective principles of perspective should in theory appear longer in front and be foreshortened in the back, reflecting the perceived decrease in relative size of more distant objects. But the front and back edges of a real planter are equal in length, and this knowledge of the physical world is incorporated into the image the painter of the Che K'an T'u created: the planter is represented as a flat surface with slides that are equal in length.

In another work, called the "Splash-ink Immortal", by Sung dynasty artist Liang K'ai, the artist wanted to portray not just any man off the street, but an other-worldly recluse, and thus it would have been inappropriate to use an ordinary human being as a model. The highly unusual, even weird, forms in this painting, with their bold and unbridled brush strokes, provide just the right background to set off the characteristics of this very extraordinary individual. This painting is representative of the "freehand brushstroke" school of traditional Chinese painting.

The fundamental component of Chinese painting is the line, as it is in Chinese calligraphy. Because of this shared feature, these two arts have had, beginning from a very early time, a close mutual relationship. By the time that literati painting had become popular in the Yuan dynasty, men of letters who painted put even more conscious effort into reaffirming the link to Chinese calligraphy, and actively led a trend to fuse calligraphy, and actively led a trend to fuse calligraphy and painting. And the close relationship between poetry and painting was formed under the strong influence of literature on painting. Scholar-statesmen and literati led the melding of poetry and painting, and this eventually spread to the academy of painting. The Sung Empror Hui Tsung is known to have used poetry to test painters on their ability to express with ink and paper the enchanted world created in written verse.

While traditional Chinese painting still occupies an important place in the life of modern Chinese, many painters now desire to express their experience of new times. By combining new modes of expression with traditional Chinese painting techniques, they are opening up a vast, new world of artistic expression.

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