Title: China - Visual arts | Britannica
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Visual arts
Learn about Chinese art including their sculptures during the Han dynasty
Performing arts

Content: China - Visual arts | Britannica
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Visual arts
Learn about Chinese art including their sculptures during the Han dynasty
A discussion concerning Chinese art, from the documentary China: West Meets East at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Great Museums Television ( A Britannica Publishing Partner) See all videos for this article
Painting and calligraphy, like poetry, were the domain of the elite, and most educated Chinese traditionally boasted of some competence in them. There are early anonymous and folk-oriented paintings on tomb and cave walls, and many works are known from the Han dynasty (206 bce –220 ce ). Fine-art painters are known by name from as early as the 6th century ce from historical records and serially copied versions of their works. Chinese painting is predominantly of landscapes, done in black pine-soot ink on fine paper or silk, occasionally with the addition of faint colour washes. The most vigorous period for landscape painting spanned the years from the Song (960–1279) to the Ming (1368–1644) dynasty. Calligraphy rivals painting as a fine art in China, and paintings are often captioned with artfully written poems. Calligraphy reveals the great fondness the Chinese have for their written characters, and it ranges in style from meticulously and laboriously scribed “seal” characters to flamboyant and unconstrained “grass” characters. Calligraphy, as painting, is prized for a number of abstract aesthetic qualities, described by such terms as balance, vitality, energy, bones, wind, and strength.