Artifacts 1. A Brush with Wisdom (1 of 19)

Artifacts

This is one of the greatest masterpieces of Chinese landscape Painting.
"Travelers among Mountains and Streams"- painted by the artist Fan Kuan in the 10th century AD.
It was inspired by his wanderings in the unreal landscapes of Mount Hua, one of the five holy mountains of China.
When Westerners first discovered Chinese paintings like this one, they could not see their value.
They wouldn't even acknowledge them as art.
But, as Confucius noted, it is possible to look without seeing.
If you learn to see beyond the surface of these paintings, you will discover their real beauty and find the deepest truths of the Chinese philosophies of life.
Enter the hidden world of Chinese painting.

What makes a Chinese painting so distinctive, so immediately recognizable as Chinese?
Is it the subject matter that Chinese artists chose to paint? Is it the different tools and techniques that they used?
Or is it how they saw what they were looking at? How do we begin to understand this unique painting tradition which has survived virtually unchanged for so many centuries?
Well, in China they say to understand painting you need to understand calligraphy - the art of writing Chinese characters with a brush.
The two arts are considered inseparable, like twins at birth.
To understand the birth of calligraphy in China we need to go back 3000 years, when Chinese holy men first began to make simple drawings on animal bones.
When the bones were heated in a fire, the voice of heaven was revealed as the priests interpreted the meaning of the cracks that appeared.