China and Art

China throws our Western categories of art into confusion. Where we see ‘decorative arts’ in the porcelains that were exported in great quantity to south-east Asia, the Middle East and Europe, or even in the great bronze ritual vessels, the Chinese take a quite different approach. The ancient bronzes used for offerings to the ancestors are among the most highly valued of all their ‘arts’ for two reasons: they were central to the most important religious activities of the earliest Chinese states and some of them carry inscriptions that describe events of those distant centuries. Thus they join the present to the past.

Ceramics, on the other hand, were rarely admired unless they had close links with the taste and collections of the imperial household and officials. The blue-and-white so much valued in 17th-century Europe was merely utilitarian. Religious sculpture
was not esteemed as art; even today, few museums in China have significant collections of Buddhist or Daoist sculpture. The greatest Chinese art was always and still is calligraphy; close behind was the painting in ink that grew out of the calligraphic tradition.

In this year, in which China hosts the Olympic Games and the British Museum has just closed its exhibition of the terracotta warriors from the tomb of the First Emperor (221-210 bc) after more than 800,000 visitors had queued to see this unique archaeological discovery, we should take stock of the very different approach to art in China. It is only too easy for the West to take its definition of art for granted. This is an art that grew out of images of human and spiritual figures, sculpted and painted, and married to stone architecture. The processions of people and animals on the Parthenon or the saints lined up at the portals of the cathedral at Chartres have in the West been regarded as expressive of the highest human skills and aspirations. Alongside these, it seems easier to admire the 6th-century Buddhist sculptures of Xiangtangshan or the terracotta warriors than the extraordinary bronzes, used in large sets, which drew together ancestors and descendants in shared ritual banquets.

If we are to look at and admire much of Chinese art, we need to see the figures or the bronzes as part of a much larger whole. Almost all the imperial tombs of the emperors who succeeded the First Emperor over two millennia were, like his, intended to create
a suitably rich and successful afterlife for their occupants. These immense tombs inhabit the Chinese landscape and make a new landscape art: the Tang (ad 618-906) or Ming (ad 1368-1644) tombs are set within large ranges of mountains and create in them new universes for the emperors after death.

Many Buddhist sculptures, likewise, were part of the Chinese landscape. Xiangtangshan, described here (pages 36-41), is only one of many extraordinary groups of caves carved into mountainsides to make places for worship and to record the piety of their benefactors. It is no surprise that the greatest of all early Chinese painting is of mountains. For these provided the sacred spaces for the worlds of the deities and for the life after death, even when they had to be realised in tomb mounds. Perhaps we should credit the Chinese with the invention of art that embraces the physical landscape.

As China modernises, it has taken hold of and reworked many of the tropes of modern Western art. Colour, photographs, sculptures – all are now deployed to comment on society. In the past, poetry in particular calligraphic styles and paintings of notable landscape spoke to an élite versed in the subtlety of criticism in a different mode. Yet while the Chinese join – and even perhaps claim, in due course, to lead – the 21st century, if we are to understand their and our present we should look backwards and appreciate the vision that created bronzes for banqueting with the ancestors and landscapes for eternal lives.