Chinese art dynasty by dynasty

Chinese art is usually divided by dynasty, since each imperial house left its mark on art. The Shang and Zhou are the ritual vessels of the Bronze Age, the Qin the terracotta army, the Tang the colourful tomb ceramics, the Song the great ink landscapes and the refined porcelain, the Yuan and Ming the blue-and-white porcelain and scholars’ painting, and the Qing, the last dynasty, imperial splendour and free individualists. After 1912 comes modern China.

Facts

Before the dynasties and the Bronze Age

Already the farmers of the Neolithic made art that astonishes: red pottery painted with spirals and fish in the Yangshao culture and jade ground into rings and tubes, bi and cong, in the Liangzhu culture at the mouth of the Yangtze. Jade cannot be carved but must be ground with sand, and the objects reveal a society with elites and rituals long before writing.

Under the Shang and Zhou, from c. 1600 BC, kings and nobles offered food and wine to their ancestors in huge bronze vessels. The surface was covered with taotie, stylised animal masks with large eyes. The Houmuwu ding, made for offerings to a royal mother, weighs 832 kilograms and is the heaviest bronze vessel to survive from ancient China. Under the Zhou the vessels were given long inscriptions, and during the centuries of warring states Confucius and Laozi lived.

Qin and Han: the empire

Qin Shi Huangdi unified China in 221 BC and standardised writing, measures and coinage. His burial complex near Xi’an contains the terracotta army, thousands of soldiers, horses and chariots in life size, according to estimates around 8,000. Every face is unique, and the figures were originally painted in strong colours that flaked off when they were excavated.

The following Han dynasty, 206 BC–AD 220, was as powerful as the Roman Empire. The Silk Road linked China with Central Asia, and Confucianism became the state ideology. Han art is known mainly from tombs: wall paintings, reliefs, lacquerware and clay models of houses and farmsteads, everything the dead needed in the afterlife.

From the Six Dynasties to the Tang

After the fall of the Han came almost four hundred years of fragmentation, the Six Dynasties. Buddhism spread from India and Central Asia, and vast cave temples were carved at Yungang and Longmen. In the south the aristocrats cultivated calligraphy and poetry, and Wang Xizhi became the most admired calligrapher in Chinese history. The theorist Xie He wrote the six principles of painting, of which the first, spirit resonance and life movement, remained an ideal for more than a thousand years.

Under the Tang, 618–907, China was a world power, and the capital Chang’an was one of the largest cities in the world. Tomb figures in sancai, three-colour ceramics in green, yellow and brown, show camels, horses and foreign merchants. The poet and painter Wang Wei has been seen as the father of landscape painting.

Song: landscape and porcelain

The Song dynasty, 960–1279, is often regarded as the high point of Chinese art. Landscape painting, shanshui, mountains and water, became the most important genre. In Travelers among Mountains and Streams by Fan Kuan, from c. 1000, an enormous mountain towers up, and at the bottom a small caravan passes that is almost invisible. Man is small in nature. How Chinese painters created depth with mist and empty space is explained in the guide to atmospheric perspective.

Emperor Huizong was himself a painter and calligrapher. In his time Zhang Zeduan painted Along the River During the Qingming Festival, a handscroll five metres long with peasants, boats, a crowded bridge and teahouses in the capital Kaifeng. Ceramics reached a refinement that has never been surpassed, with simple forms and glazes in celadon green, sky blue and ivory white; read more in the period Song.

Yuan and Ming: the scholars and the blue-and-white

Under the Mongol Yuan dynasty, 1279–1368, many scholars refused to serve the new regime and painted for themselves instead. Huang Gongwang worked for several years on Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains from 1350; the scroll was damaged in a fire in 1650 and today exists in two parts, in Taipei and Hangzhou. Ni Zan painted sparse, empty landscapes that became an ideal for later painters. Meanwhile, in Jingdezhen, they began to decorate porcelain with cobalt from Persia.

Under the Ming, 1368–1644, the Forbidden City was built in Beijing, and blue-and-white porcelain became world famous. The blue-and-white vase with dragons from the reign of the Xuande Emperor, c. 1430, shows a five-clawed dragon, a motif reserved for the emperor. In the wealthy city of Suzhou, Shen Zhou and Wen Zhengming painted the scholars’ gardens and gatherings, and Dong Qichang later divided painting into a northern and a southern school. The design section’s history of Chinese form and the guide to porcelain, earthenware and stoneware show more of the porcelain.

The Qing and modern China

The Manchus took power in 1644 and founded the Qing, China’s last dynasty. The emperors Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong were great collectors, and the court workshops made porcelain, enamel and jade of the highest technical standard. Ming loyalists became monks or eccentrics: Bada Shanren painted fish and birds with angry, upturned eyes, and Shitao wrote that he used his own method. The Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione painted at court and blended Chinese and European styles. The Swedish East India Company fetched porcelain, tea and silk in Canton.

When the empire fell in 1912, modern China began. Qi Baishi renewed ink painting with shrimps and flowers, and Xu Beihong introduced European realism. After 1949 art was to serve the revolution, and during the Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976 many artists were persecuted. From the 1980s the country opened up, and artists such as Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing and Cai Guo-Qiang became internationally known.

How to read a Chinese scroll

Chinese paintings are often mounted as scrolls. A handscroll, such as the Qingming scroll, is unrolled bit by bit from right to left and viewed by one person at a time, much as one reads a book. A hanging scroll is hung on the wall for a time and then rolled up again. The drawing below shows the parts of a hanging scroll, from the suspension loop to the roller.

Look for the red seals. The artist added his own, but later owners, collectors and emperors added their seals and sometimes whole poems, so that an old scroll can bear the traces of many readers down the centuries. In Sweden there is a large collection of Chinese art in the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm, and the whole Chinese trail can be found in the app’s history.

The dynasties in brief

Exercise

Under which dynasty did the blue-and-white porcelain from Jingdezhen become world famous?