Shanshui Analysis

Shanshui is a style of painting that has been practiced in China for one and a half millennia, it has a long history and it is part of world’s cultural heritage. It has always been more engaging to the hearts of the Chinese literati than flower-birds and human figure. Shanshui is not only for its own sake, but also as a vehicle, its because the it was never only about holding up a mirror to the landscape in keeping with dominant aesthetic tastes. It was always about reflecting on and negotiating the artists’ own position in relation to the world in that era – for centuries one with a majestic and noble nature of which humans were but a small and insignificant part. The other criteria were harmony, beauty and technique of execution.

When looking at the tradition of shanshui, it seems to face an endless stream of reproductions of limited number of landscape stereotypes. New masters built their reputation particularly on borrowing and copying freely from those old masters. Still, now when people learn Chinese landscape painting, they start with imitation (臨摹), which means they was confined to copying old masters, thus studying and copying masters’ works are necessary foundations for artists’ creation. From the modern culture condition, creating is what art should do, but not like the way of tradition shanshui used to be. But then, some studies found that what they call “copy” is not really what we understand “copy” to mean. From particularly tracing to liberal reinterpretation to subtle recreation, what begins as a way of learning continues as a way of self-cultivation and of creation. Dong Qichang said that the main point of using brush and ink to imitate the masterpiece is that to connect with and think deeply of the original on...

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..., he acknowledges and reinterprets traditional Chinese art in his works. This is his mode of expression via shanshui tradition, and his ways of thinking, viewing and perceiving are infiltrated by the literati ethos. He works in the computer with his countless digital photographs, he creates virtual city landscape, combining the countless small format snapshots in a way that imitate the characteristic structure and composition of the classical shanshui. In his works, we can see that it always visualizes how China is developing and illustrates the consequences of modernization, globalization and the destruction of China’s ecological equilibrium caused by the speedy growth of its megacities over the past few decades. Yang said, “ The media… is not important, no matter what method you use to create, to maintain the creative spirit of the ancients is the most import.”1