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Ilaria Maria Sala

One needs years of immersion in Chinese culture, language, history and philosophy to be able to fully appreciate the timeless beauty and symbolic richness of Chinese ink paintings.
Despite this, everyone can still appreciate the art’s elegant and harmonious forms, be moved by the delicate brushstrokes, and glimpse the universal values that connect across cultures and time.
One could do worse than to start with landscape paintings, one of the greatest traditions in Chinese painting, with origins going back to the Tang dynasty (618-907). While people did, of course, paint landscapes before this, it was only after the sixth century that an independent genre appeared.
In Chinese, landscape art is called shanshui, which literally means “mountains and water” – two elements that are in nearly all Chinese landscape paintings.
Landscape art is not just a realistic depiction of nature; it is an illustration of a state of mind and a metaphor for philosophical ideals, such as how mountains and water correspond to yin and yang, a principle of ancient Chinese philosophy.

Before delving into the sophisticated systems of Chinese art, one should start by just looking.
“One way of enjoying what we look at is by imagining how someone created that, and appreciating that ability, because using the Chinese brush is very delicate and very challenging: once you have placed the brush to paper, you can’t go back,” says Elizabeth Kindall, an associate professor in art history at the University of St Thomas, in the US state of Minnesota.
“It is not like Western painting in that sense. Once you have made a brush stroke, it’s there forever.”
Kindall is the co-author of the catalogue of the Hong Kong Museum of Art’s new exhibition, The Pride of Hong Kong: Three Preeminent Collections of Ancient Paintings and Calligraphies.
The impossibility of having room for ripensamento, or the second thoughts that are often discovered when oil paintings are placed under infrared light, means that mark-making with the Chinese brush tends to be done with far greater economy than in the Western tradition, as every line and curve is final and relevant.
Paintings such as Walking on a Mountain Path in Spring by Ma Yuan (c. 1160-1225), in Taiwan’s National Palace Museum, show depth and perspective through the most subtle outline of a set of mountains in the top left-hand corner of the painting.
The man in the painting – a scholar staring into the distance and facing away from the viewer – appears to be looking at emptiness, with the suggestion of a path fading as if into a dense fog.

Ma was one of the most famous painters of the Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279), and this painting highlights a second key element of Chinese aesthetics – namely, the importance of space.
The empty spaces in paintings, carved furniture, sculptures and architecture are as significant as the filled-in areas. As we see in Ma Yuan’s landscape, these large, empty spaces are often filled with poems – calligraphic tributes by different owners of a painting over time. These inscriptions, or colophons, are often the most reliable record of provenance.
“Those tell us quite often who owned [the paintings] previously and how they interpreted the paintings: we can see the entire life of the object by looking at those,” says Kindall.
An even more striking example of this use of empty spaces can be found in The Remote and Clear Landscape of Wuxing, a scroll painting in which the Yuan dynasty artist Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322) depicted the famous Lake Tai in his hometown.

This painting in the Shanghai Museum collection is a near-abstract composition in which the landscape appears as a blue and green horizontal streak across the otherwise empty silk support.
This is an exquisite example of qinglu, the blue-green palette often used for shanshui paintings, which has been in use since the Tang dynasty. In Zhao’s painting, the empty spaces represent both the water and the sky, contributing to a tradition of unstated elegance that allows people to fill in the blanks with their imagination.
As in other cultures, the practice of copying earlier masters is often part of the training for Chinese artists. That extends to a habit of citing previous generations’ stylistic traditions and an established archive of texture strokes, called cun, that are used to represent trees and rocks.
“Brushstrokes were always meant to look effortless, and no painter would ever have wanted to be described as skilful: skill, or professional talent, would be seen as bad. Each brushstroke had to be the representation of the artist, the transmission of mind and self,” says Kindall.

At the same time, innovation results in variation.
One of China’s most influential artists and art historians, Dong Qichang (1555-1636), split up the major artists of old into the Northern and Southern schools. The former were known for their intricate, monumental and formal compositions and use of blues and greens, versus the Southern school’s literati style, distinguished by more impressionistic brushwork and a monochrome ink wash that produced softer, evanescent contours.
“Another element we need to think of is to examine why they were painted: what was the function of painting in Chinese landscape studies?” says Kindall. “They were made for so many different reasons – for private viewing, for people to enjoy, wondering in and losing themselves in the painted scene, leaving behind the very urban environment they lived in.
“China was already overpopulated by the 12th century, so people who wanted to get away could look at landscapes. Or they were made to [be enjoyed] with friends, as intimate social experiences.”
Through the centuries, social gatherings of artists – especially the artist-scholars known as the literati – often featured hours spent drinking wine or tea, producing and admiring each other’s poetry, calligraphy and paintings. They would delight in the use of coded symbols that were recognised by all.
The plum blossom, the orchid, the bamboo and the chrysanthemum flowers, for example, were known as the “Four Gentlemen” and represented different virtues, while political disenchantment was represented by small human figures secluded within a rugged landscape.
Today, with Chinese paintings viewable in museums all over the world and online, this rich tradition is accessible to everyone, and you do not need to be a Sinophile to appreciate it.


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Chinese landscape paintings are displayed at “The Pride of Hong Kong: Three Preeminent Collections of Ancient Paintings and Calligraphies”, an exhibition now on at the Hong Kong Museum of Art. Photo: Nora Tam

A visitor looks at a landscape painting at “The Pride of Hong Kong: Three Preeminent Collections of Ancient Paintings and Calligraphies”, an exhibition currently showing at the Hong Kong Museum of Art. Photo: Nora Tam

Walking on a Mountain Path in Spring, by Ma Yuan, at Taiwan’s National Palace Museum. Photo: National Palace Museum

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“The Pride of Hong Kong: Three Preeminent Collections of Ancient Paintings and Calligraphies” exhibition can be seen at the Hong Kong Museum of Art. The exhibition features 93 sets of masterpieces from the Tang dynasty (618-907) to the Qing (1644-1912). Photo: Nora Tam

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Everyone can appreciate the harmonious forms of Chinese landscape art and glimpse the universal values that connect across cultures and time


Everyone can appreciate the harmonious forms of Chinese landscape art and glimpse the universal values that connect across cultures and time.


Chinese culture

What you need to know about: Chinese culture

Why Chinese landscape paintings are easy to appreciate even if you’re not an expert

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Everyone can appreciate the harmonious forms of Chinese landscape art and glimpse the universal values that connect across cultures and time

Everyone can appreciate the harmonious forms of Chinese landscape art and glimpse the universal values that connect across cultures and time