Shaping Beyond Likeness

4 min read

Ancient Chinese artists did not abide by the principle of perspective, and sometimes even tried to purposefully avoid the issue. From the 16th century onwards, many people have raised doubts and questions about this, the most representative of whom was Hendrik Willem Van Loon (1882-1944). He said, in his The Art of Mankind, that in this world, only the Chinese and children didnot pay attention to the principle of perspective. He thus with scorn dismissed traditional Chinese painting.

China has boasted systematic books on art for over 1,500 years. Xie He (birth and death dates unknown), an art critic of the Southern Dynasties(420-589), put forward the “Six-way Theory,”or six basic principles about painting, in his Appreciating Classic Paintings(Guhua pinlu). Among the six principles,”Vividly expressing flavor and tone”came first, and has remained the supreme principle for Chinese painting ever since. Over the long period of 1,500 years, flavor and tone in paintings have been much more stressed than likeness in form. Su Dongpo (1036-1101) of the Northern Song Dynasty said,”If one appreciates a painting from the perspective of resemblance, one’s appreciation of art is level with children.”This was a view quite contrary to Van Loon’s. VanLoon remarked that the lack of the principle of perspective as well as likeness in form in Chinese paintings had kept them at the level of children’s scrawls.Interestingly, Su Dongpo believed that if a person painted while bearing likeness in mind, he was no more than a child painting.

What contradictory ideas European and Chinese artists held toward painting!On the issue of perspective, there was once a heated debate in China. Wang Wei of the Tang Dynasty was an unconventional painter, who broke away from a fixed perspective when painting. He once drew different scenes of the four seasons in a single painting-Yuan An Sleeping in the Snow. In it, there is ascene of”a palm tree in the snow.”It is an acknowledged fact that all palm leaves fall in the autumn and cannot possibly be seen in the icy cold winter.

Some people make critical remarks on this, while more agree with the artist because they believed that to paint is to express feelings, not form; palm leaves in the snow are an image in the artist’s mind, which can of course then be represented on the tableau.There was indeed one Chinese painter who noticed the principle of perspective.He was the master landscape painter Li Cheng (919-967), from the early Northern Song Dynasty. He usually drew objects from a fixed point of view.For example, if he drew a building, he would stand at one point and look up at the eaves, and what he drew would be lifelike. However, Shen Kuo (1031-1095),a great scientist of the same dynasty, later made sharp criticisms of those paintings, believing that an artist should “look at the small from the perspective of the big,”instead of the other way round as Li Cheng had done. That is to say, genuine artists should not focus on the specific details they see but should observe things with their”mind’s eye.”Artists should present the world in their mind, insteadof being confined to what they physically see.This is what”looking at the small from theperspective of the big”means.”The big”here refers to the power of the human mind.Chinese paintings depict an imagined world as well as a spiritual world. For instance, the Southern-Song-dynasty (1127-1279) artist Ma Yuan(1140-1225) once created a painting called Angling Alone on the Cold River. The scene is very simple, but the connotations of the painting are rich and profound. It features a tranquil night, with the moon shedding its pale light on the peaceful river, on which there is only one little boat.A man sits inthe boat, his body slightly bent forward, his attention all focused on the water. The stern of the boat is turned slightly upwards, with faint traces of waves around it and a sense of leisure enveloping it, as it follows the water to wherever its flow may take it.

Everything is painstakingly wrought to express a spiritual world free from worldly cares:a deep and serene night. cool and silent surroundings,a cold crescent moon,a little boat, and a lonely person, with this tranquil world all to himself.Apparently, the artist was not concerned with angling. but with the spiritual world he lived in. This is an important characteristic of Chinese painting.