| China has the world's oldest living civilization. It's written history goes back almost
3,500 years, and the history told by it's artifacts and artwork goes back much farther. The oldest known works of Chinese
art include pottery and jade carvings from the time of 5000 BC. Jade is a general term used to describe either jadeite or
nephrite, known as true jade. It's composed of several minerals. It's smooth and rich in texture, but it's also extremely
tough. It can be off-white, or dark green, and sometimes has a reddish tint. Authentic jade is cool and never translucent.
The philosopher Confucius described jade perfectly when he said: "It is soft, smooth and shining- like intelligence. It's
edges seem sharp but do not cut- like justice. It hangs down to the ground- like humility. When struckm, it gives clear, ringing
sounds- like music. The strains in it are not hidden and add to it's beauty- like truthfulness. It has brightness- like heaven.
It's firm substance is born of the mountains and the waters- like the earth." The material has been used since the Shang dynasty,
which lasted from 1766-1022 B.C. They see it as a sign of wealth and authority and also as an object of beauty. The chinese
word for jade is yu. During the Ming dynasty, the Chinese people thought that only green or white stones were true jade, and
the other colors were called fu yu, or false jade. It was classified into nine different colors during the Tsin dynasty, and
has more recently been classified into many different categories.
Jade is one of the touchest stones in the world, near the diamond because of overlapping fibers within the
stone. Tons of pressure are needed to crush some of the larger pieces of jade. A single cut through a one foot cube of jade
would take several weeks.
The ancient chinese people thought that jade had special powers, and they used it in rituals and ceremonies.
It was also beleived to have medical uses, but the most common use is for decoration. Jade is not mined in China, but China
is still considered the "home" of jade because the artists from China have learned to carve the stone better than the artists
from any other country. The ancient artists would stare at rough pieces of jade, and then decide what they wanted to carve
it into.
Chinese pottery is also an ancient form of art in China. It was first created in the pre-dynastic neolithic
era. Some fragments of pottery are from 3,000 B.C. 4,000 years after that, the porcelain from the Sung and Ming dynasty, the
most famous and beautiful porcelain in the world, was created. Although other countries also created China, the pottery originated
in Asia. French porcelain was inspired by the delicate white work from the Ting dynasty, and Clue and white Dutch Delft porcelain
was modeled after pottery from the Ming dynasty.
Pottery started out as functional, but became more ornamental as the centires continued. the themes of the
painted and carved porcelain were mostly nature scenes, but they were also from folklore. Artrists originaly molded the clay
with their hands and set it in the sun to try. Eventualy they began to use a potter's wheel, and they used a glaze at the
same time as the romans.
During the Tang dynasty, Chinese pottery began to develop it's own distict style. They used the first colored
glazes, and underglaze painting. The best pottery came from the time between the Sung dynasty and the Ming times, when the
King hired officials to work in his court strictly as potters. When these artists made mistakes in their work (cracks or drips),
they used the mistakes to create a picture, such as turning a crack into a tree, or a drip into a teardrop.
Although painting was not China's first form of art, it is probably the most important and dominating form
today. Chinese paintings have always tried to capture philosophy as well as details. 1,400 years ago, Hsieh Ho, made six basic
laws for painting, which artists in China still follow today. They are: 1. Paiting has to have rythem and movement, it has
an existence of its own 2. The brush should be used to establish structure in painting in the same manner as in calligraphy
3. Observe conformity with nature and natural proportions 4. Use color appropriately 5. Live up to tradition by copying the
masters Chinese artists try to create perfect artwork because they beleive strongly in the philosophy of painting, and many
paintings are missing objects that the artist did not think necessary, such as the water around a fish.
Even if a chinese artist draws something that does not exist, such as a dragon, what he creates is always
done in the style of realism, so that the finished product looks like it could actualy be alive.
Artists try to paint from memory rather than from pictures, and they use brushes, solidified ink, a stone
slab to grind the ink, color pigments, and paper or silk. A Chinese painter will always hold his brush as perfectly perpendicular
to the paper as possible, and he will never use an easel. The human figure did not appear in Chinese art until the Han dynasty,
where it was used to express religious ideas.
The people of china write their language in the form of calligraphy, and it has become as much of an art form
as painting or sculpting. It is not considered just handwriting, but it has to show personality and style.General Yueh Fei
was an accomplished caligrapher. The emperor began to suspect his loyalty, and so he turned to calligraphy because he was
hurt so deeply. The result was his copy of the Report to the Emperor Before an Expedition, which has become a calligraphic
masterpiece.
The brush used for calligraphy in China was invented before the fifth century B.C. and quick-absorbing paper
was invented to go along with it. The system of calligraphy is beautiful, but works of calligraphy have to be done perfectly,
because wrong figures cannot be corrected.
When an artist writes something with calligraphy, what he writes is not always as important as how the figures
look on paper. Sometimes they will even be unrecognizable, but it's not considered wrong if the artist thought it would improve
the project.
For ten to fifteen years, an artist must be an apprentice to a classic Chinese calligrapher, and then work
on developing a style of his own. There are three basic categories in calligraphy, regular, running, and grass tyles. Regular
is elaborate, running is rapid, and grass is a shorthand form of writing.
Over a thousand years before crafters in Rome began molding bronze, artists in China's Shang dynasty were
begining to experiment. The works were burried and forgotten, but in 1934, dozens of inscribed bronze works were excavated
at Anyang in Honan province. The pieces of art that were discovered were nearly perfect, and historians could not beleive
what they saw. Most of the art had been burried in the soft banks of the Yellow river, and were perfectly preserved. The National
Palace Museum in Taipei has more than 4,000 bronze items.
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