Engaged with Traditional Chinese Art

Art that works with the ink painting, calligraphy, ceramics and other traditions of China, from the Ming literati to today.

No works indexed yet · 10 related artists

No open-access works for Engaged with Traditional Chinese Art are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.

About

Chinese painting has always been in conversation with its own past. The Ming painter and theorist Dong Qichang (1555–1636) built landscapes as free variations ‘in the manner of’ Song and Yuan masters, and quoting earlier brushwork stayed central for centuries. Renewal also came from antiquity: the Qing calligrapher Zhao Zhiqian drew energy from ancient stone inscriptions and seal script.

In the 20th century artists weighed ink against Western modernism. Zhang Daqian's splashed-colour landscapes of the 1960s pour pigment where a brush once travelled, and in Hong Kong Lui Shou-kwan and Wucius Wong led the New Ink Painting movement. Since the 1980s the tradition has become a subject for critique as well as practice. Xu Bing's Book from the Sky (1987–91) fills hand-printed volumes with invented characters, Yun-Fei Ji paints scroll-like scenes of villagers displaced by the Three Gorges Dam, and Ai Weiwei has used Jingdezhen porcelain at vast scale.