Porcelain and Chinese Painting and Calligraphy
2 min readChinese painting and calligraphy occupies a special status in the world painting art, as it is able to create almost any types of vivid visual images on xuan paper or silk, simply by using brush and ink. With the invention ofporcelain and innovation of new technologies, people began to decorate the exterior of porcelain with painting and calligraphy, which led to a new way for their expression.
The Tang dynasty was a booming era for Chinese painting and calligraphy. At that time, many great masters of calligraphy and painting emerged, and left numerous famous artworks. In such a social context, folk artists ably brought calligraphy and painting art into porcelain decoration, and products of Changsha kiln were the most representative. They were not only decorated with life-like paintings, but also poem lines and proverbs, and provide an important resource for us to understand the folk literature and art during that time.
By the Song dynasty, nourished by the prevailing literary atmosphere and great achievements made in painting, as manifested by the emergence of many great painters and painting works, folk artists brought motifs welcomed by ordinary people onto porcelain with simple and vivid brushwork. Products of Cizhou kiln are the best examples of such style. It employed the traditional wash painting technique by drawing black designs on white ground, which is unique and charming.
New decorative techniques for porcelain came forth one after another during the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties. Among them, blue-and-white ware best displayed the appeal of Chinese wash painting, as it usually presented a misty and fresh scene that corresponded to the pursuit of wash paintings. Such feature was most distinctive during the Kangxi period when blue-and-white decoration achieved the effect of five-layered-ink-color tones to fully display the artistic conception of ink paintings. Together with other porcelain decoration techniques developed during the same time, such as five-color, contending colors, cloisonne and famille rose influenced by western painting style, painting on porcelain reached a peak.
