Letter to Art Lovers: Historical development of Chinese brushwork

Dear friends,

Today, let's take a bird's eye view and cover the first period of the historical development of Chinese brushwork: The Archaic Period.

Neolithic designs.

There is reason to believe that the Chinese had been utilizing a brush for decorative painting and writing long before the dawn of recorded Chinese history. The designs painted on the red pottery of the Neolithic time (3rd millennium B.C.) clearly reveal that slips of red-earth color and dark dye were applied by brush.

It is obvious that these designs (Fig. 3) were not made by fingers or a wooden or bamboo stick but with a brush, otherwise the fine mesh textures and the curved lines could not have been achieved.

Judging from the hard-edged quality of the lines, one can assume that the tool employed must have been made of some kind of hard fur, possibly deer or weasel. As to the dye, it could have been a by-product from the burning of some kind of wood, perhaps charcoal or soot.

There is a segment of Shang (13th century B.C.) pottery with the character chi (year) written on it in black; after a chemical test, it proved to be a kind of carbon dye. The Chinese brush is usually made of animal fur and its handle either of wood or bamboo -- perishable materials that can hardly be expected to last indefinitely. This presumably explains the lack of evidence for the use of the brush in Neolithic times.

The oldest brush that has been found, unearthed from an ancient Chu, one of the large states of the Warring States period (480 - 222 B.C.), tomb near Ch' ang Sha in 1954 (Fig. 4)

Scholars have been puzzled by the patterns on the pottery. Peter Swann in Art of Chine, Korea, and Japan writes, "Since buried with the dead, the designs painted on them, eminently suitable for pottery decoration, may also have had a symbolic content of which, alas, we know almost nothing."

Despite the lack of evidence, however, there are ways of probing the problem. It has long been acknowledged that the primitive people in the remote Chinese past were fanatical believers in ghosts, as well as worshipers of ancestors. It was their custom that the deceased be provided with everything that he used during his earthly life -- hence the burial objects found in these graves.

That the people of the red Pottery culture had advanced to living in houses instead of caves, were tillers of the soil, fished, had domestic animals and knew the benefits of fire, are established archaeological facts, which have buttressed Chinese legendary history concerning the Neolithic period.

Examinations of the designs painted on this pottery reveals three common picture symbols (see Fig. 3). The crisscrossing lines suggest the weave of a fishing net or basket; the arch- forming curved lines may portray flames; and the undulant horizontal lines on the outside wall of the basin probably are ripples or waves.

These decorative picture symbols are, in my opinion, merely the result of the inspiration and observation gleaned from daily life; I doubt that there is any deeper symbolism involved.

In terms of Chinese brushwork, the work of this period is too simple and too primitive to be considered more than conceptual.

Hsiang Hsing Wen Tze or Ideograms.

The next evidence of the brush appears in the ideograms, roughly two millennia later, found inscribed on the unearthed bronze vessels and on shell and bones daring from the 16th-10th century B.C., the Shang and Chou periods. These ideograms had evolved and were in common use at a much earlier date, however. It has long been accepted that Tsang Chieh, the official recorder of the court of Huang Ti (2367 B.C.) was the inventor of Chinese picture writing.

Since so much has been written on the development of the Chinese language, it will suffice here merely to outline what we are seeing when we view a Chinese ancient character on a bronze or a piece of bone:

1. These Hsian Hsing (hieroglyphic) characters were derived from primitive drawings. Only when primitive man gave his drawing, of an object or an idea, a definitive, repeatable, consistent meaning did his painting become a word, a pictogram or an ideogram. (See Fig. 5)

2. Since the words were paintings, but the paintings were script, one sees in these ancient ideograms the origin of the close association between Chinese painting and calligraphy, an association which has persisted through the ages.

3. These ancient characters indicate that the Chinese written language was the product of a low development from the pictorial, gradually modified into abstract designs. The best illustrations of this point is the word "to comprehend" as the etymologist Chiang Shan-Kuo traced its evolution. (See Fig. 6)

Until next time, my best wishes.

-- Kwo Da-Wei