Traditional Chinese painting is a unique art in world art field. It adopts special brush and paper as tools, painting ink as paint, using wonderful expressional methods according to Chinese aesthetic habits. Traditional Chinese painting has long history and excellent traditions, which forms its own unique system in world art field. It is an important part of our country’s traditional culture as well as the precious treasure of Chinese people.

Traditional Chinese painting has a long history. Generally speaking, works before Tang Dynasty mainly focus on the reflection of people’s activities, forming a prime time of figure painting. In the middle of Tang Dynasty, paintings in landscape and flower & bird began to be popular. Works with the theme of forest and rural area can free you from the hustle and bustle of the world and enable you to enter a peaceful land, so landscape painting is favored by scholars and officials. Flowers, plants, stones, birds and beasts in the paintings are living creatures in the mountains, full of vitality and also attractive to many people. Therefore, paintings of landscape and flower & bird started to be popular after figure painting. The three kinds of paintings form the three main categories of traditional Chinese painting.

The emperors and aristocrats of Tang and Song Dynasties are the important painting supporters, so the art developed in such an environment had very serious political meaning with its style tending to be magnificent. In Song Dynasty, there was art academy with complete systems in the palace. Esp. Emperor Huizong, who was good at painting, treated artists very well. He also set up organizations to cultivate talents. So the activities of art academy reached the zenith during this period.

Compared with western paintings, traditional Chinese painting has its own obvious characteristics. Traditional Chinese painting emphasizes on “the spirit delivery through form” and pursues the feeling of “wonder lies in the similarity and dissimilarity”. According to the artistic techniques, traditional Chinese paintings have three techniques: meticulous, freehand and combination of the former two. Meticulous painting is characterized by detailed and fine brushwork; freehand painting is marked by the freehand brushwork. Meticulous painting focuses on beautiful lines and fine works; completely opposite to meticulous painting, ignoring lines and paying special attention to the theme, freehand painting needs high generalization ability. It aims at reflecting the theme with fewer drawings. The brushwork should be accurate, familiar and skillful, so that the theme can be reflected in the brushwork. The combinational of meticulous and freehand painting is the comprehensive application of the two techniques.

Since traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy have much in common in tools and brushes, they are closely related to each other. The ancient people had already had the theory of “painting and calligraphy share the same origin”. When scholar artists were dominant in Yuan Dynasty, they also believed the concept that painting and calligraphy shared the same origin and advocated study painting by starting from calligraphy. The relationship between poem and painting formed with the gradually increasing influence of literature upon painting. The melting of poem and painting was guided by scholars and officials, which also affected the art academy. Emperor Huizong of the Song Dynasty once tested the artist with poems to see whether the artist could describe the wonderful artistic conception in the poems.

Since the Song Dynasty, a few artists began to sign or stamp at the inconspicuous corner of the painting. By the time when scholar painting was popular in the Yuan Dynasty, scholars wanted to demonstrate their calligraphy and articles, so they added relevant inscription or poems after the signature in the conspicuous place. The signature and painting formed a new combined relationship. The stamping of artists became a convention. Besides poem, calligraphy and painting, seal art also came into being, which gave traditional Chinese painting more abundant artistic connotation.

As the time goes on, the artistic contents and forms of traditional Chinese painting are also changing. Esp. after “May 4th Movement” in 1919, western paintings poured in. Traditional Chinese painting absorbed many western artistic skills with its broad bosom, enriching the expressiveness of traditional Chinese painting. Thanks to its unique system in world art field, it lets out peculiar brilliance in the artistic garden of world art with diversified arts.