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Landscape painting in ink with rocks and trees and a river: Ancient Chinese art

Ancient Chinese art: Song Dynasty painting

General themes of ancient Chinese art

From the earliest Stone Age art to the Ming Dynasty in 1500 AD, Chinese artists took up the same themes over and over again. They were interested in swirling lines. They were interested in nature: animals, trees, flowers, rocks, water. Chinese artists wanted to express the relationship between people and nature.

More about Stone Age art in China
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The Stone Age in China
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Pottery, bronze jars, and lacquer boxes

But there were also big changes in Chinese art, some caused by new ideas within China, and some by new ideas coming from India, Central Asia, or West Asia. In the Stone Age, Chinese artists experimented with pottery.

History of pottery

They used swirling brushwork to decorate the pots – that continued throughout Chinese art. Beginning in the Shang Dynasty, artists also cast bronze jars in molds with designs of dragons, elephants, and other creatures. During the Zhou Dynasty, Chinese artists also began to make all kinds of lacquered boxes.

When was the Zhou Dynasty?
What is lacquer?
How do you make bronze?

painting of two oxen

Ancient Chinese art: T’ang dynasty oxen

Painting landscapes, animals, and people

But painting people and landscapes came very late to China, spreading slowly east across Asia; while people were painting images in 30,000 BC in Europe, and by 9000 BC in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and by 500 BC in Iran, paintings of people and trees only reached India with the rise of the Silk Road about 300 BC, and came to China about the same time, with the first Eastern Zhou paintings on silk cloth.

Eastern Zhou dynasty
Chinese art in the Zhou Dynasty
Where does silk come from?

Buddhism and ancient Chinese art

Painting of a rabbit and a tree

Song Dynasty painting of a rabbit and a tree

When Chinese people learned about Buddhism, under the Han Dynasty, they also learned about Buddhist art styles in India, and these new styles had a huge effect on Chinese art.

What is Buddhism?

Chinese sculptors learned to make life-size stone statues. About the same time, traders on the Silk Road began to bring Roman blown glass to China. Chinese potters, perhaps trying to imitate blown glass, soon created porcelain. Around the same time, Chinese artists invented paper and began to use it to paint on.

Han Dynasty Chinese art
Where does blown glass come from?
What is porcelain?
Who invented paper?

Taoism and Chinese line drawing

By the time of the Three Kingdoms, Chinese painting became much more important. Artists worked with swirling brushstrokes to create striking line paintings. T’ang Dynasty paintings depict people, horses, and elaborate landscapes colored with green and blue paints. Song Dynasty paintings, influenced by Taoism and Confucianism, often show tiny people dwarfed by nature.

What is Taoism?
Who was Confucius?
T’ang Dynasty Chinese art
Song Dynasty Chinese art 

Artists became concerned with economy of line: one simple line makes us see the whole cliff, or flowers, or birds. They began to draw just one flower, or one bird.The Mongol invasions brought a new energy and enthusiasm to painting, but then under the Ming Dynasty artists began to explore still-life painting, and to reconsider and revive the styles of the past.

More about Ming Dynasty art
Who were the Mongols?

Did you find out what you wanted to know about ancient Chinese art? Let us know in the comments!

Learn by doing: making a Chinese scroll
More about Han Dynasty art
More about Chinese architecture

Bibliography and further reading about Chinese art:

The British Museum Book of Chinese Art, by Jessica Rawson and others (1996). Rawson is a curator at the British Museum, and she uses the collection of the British Museum to illustrate this book. Library Journal calls it “easily the best introductory overview of Chinese art to appear in years”.

Art in China (Oxford History of Art Series), by Craig Clunas (1997). Not specifically , but a good introduction to the spirit of Chinese art. Warning: this one is not arranged in chronological order. Instead, it has chapters on sculpture, calligraphy, and so on.

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