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From Pottery to Paper-The roots of Chinese painting

The Wei Dynasty is a milestone in the history of Chinese painting. Before the Wei Dynasty (AD220-265), all Chinese art was recorded on buildings, pottery, bronze, stone and silk. Around AD220, however, paintings fixed on scrolls appeared for the first time, while painting also emerged as a profession in its own right.

Long before the rise of the Wei, the earliest Chinese artists used natural minerals in black, white and red to draw simple lines on pottery. Between 5000 and 2000 BC, when Chinese culture was developing in the valleys of the Yellow and Wei rivers, painting was devoted to geometric patterns and animal representations.

Later artistic efforts have been found on rocks and cave walls all over China. More than 80,000 such paintings have been recorded in Helongjiang, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Guangxi, Sichuan, Yunan, Guizhou and Fujian. Most of these paintings depict people hunting, feeding animals and dancing, while others concern totem worship and other religious practices.

As the use of bronze spread, engraving skills began to develop and reflect a higher standard of artistic endeavour. During the Han Dynasty (202BC-AD220), carvings on stones and bricks reached a still more elevated plane, depicting folktales, historical stories and working scenes. Han art had a major influence on the development of art in Japan.

Frescoes in temples and tombs are among the earliest complex painted works to survive to the modern day. Using a varied palette of black, yellow, red and green, the basic outlines of the traditional Chinese painting style can be discerned in these works. This is even more true of those fragments of painting on silk that have been preserved – the most advanced art form in China before the invention of paper around the beginning of the second century AD.