About Traditional Chinese Landscape Paintings

What do traditional Chinese artists love so much about landscape paintings? What’s the secret meanings behind these paintings of mountains and rivers?

Let’s explore China’s thousand-year-old tradition of landscape paintings. “Streams and mountains never end.” These landscape treasures reflect the Taoism view of the world that humans are tiny compared to the majesty of nature and that only mountains and rivers last for eternity.

Generally, materials of traditional Chinese landscape paintings are either on silk or rice paper (very absorbent paper). Main formats of the Chinese landscape paintings known as the following: Handscroll format: the painting is from right to left, you will experience the cinematic unfolding of the composition as you go along. Viewers looking at these long handscrolls piece by piece is a journey. Starting at the little begging hamlets and slowly traveling along with the painting, you will have many amazing discoveries. Mount on a wall hanging scroll format. Paint on fans and albums format.

There are different styles in traditional Chinese landscape painting. They are as the following:

Landscapes of Poetry:

As early as a thousand years ago, calligraphy writing is often a part of the painting to describe the scene, notations about the painting, title, date and artist’s signature.

Landscapes of Magic:

The blue and green landscapes make viewers think of a magical distant past. It’s a symbolic code in Chinese painting where the painter is signaling to viewers that this is a place that you would have to go through some magical portal to get to.

The Landscapes of Reclusion:

This style is an idea that’s very prevalent in Chinese Arts, Chinese Literature, Chinese intellectual philosophy. It suggests that when things are going haywire in society, it’s a totally acceptable solution to turn your back on society and move into the mountains to become one with nature or change the focus to poetry, painting and music.