Artifacts 1. A Brush with Wisdom (14 of 19)

Artifacts

For example, in the year 1804 one English visitor to China reported the Chinese were 'unable to pencil out a correct outline of many objects, to give body to the same by the application of proper lights and shadows, and to lay on the nice shades of colour, so as to resemble the tints of nature.'
Traditional western painting utilizes a fixed point of view, with linear perspective.
This means these painting contain a vanishing point, just where two train tracks, for example, meet on the horizon.
Likewise, western paintings employ a fixed light source to throw shadows.
But the Chinese did understand and use these techniques.
In fact, ever since the Song dynasty in the 12th century, there has been a school of Chinese painting that specialises in realistic techniques of perspective and color.

This tradition was championed by the emperor Huizong, who hated the abstract landscapes so much favored by his father, in fact he ordered them to be used to wipe up the mess in the painting studio.
Huizong advocated a strict representational realism.
His court painters painted birds and flowers, exquisitely observed, in enamel-bright colors.
It is a style full removed from the great landscapes of the 11 th century.
But many scholars thought the court painters were missing the point.
Just as Song dynasty painting presented a degree of realism never before matched, the famous scholar-offiicial Su Shih defended the great Mandarin abstract tradition of Wang Xishi and Fan Kuan.
One time while correcting examinations, Su Shih was inspired to paint bamboo but found himself without black ink; all that was available was the red ink used for correcting student exams.
So he used this red ink to paint red bamboo.
When he showed this red bamboo to his fellow painters at the academy, they laughed at him and mockingly asked "Where in the world does bamboo grow red?"