A Study Of The Tradition Of Fine Brush-Stroke Painting And Its Modern Development

The modern transformation of Chinese art is one of the fundamental issues of the study of the modern Chinese art history. Among them Chinese Traditional Painting is one of the composite parts of such transformation, which is as important as an epochal task in the development of Chinese Traditional Painting. In recent years many scholars have discussed this topic from the perspective of the relationship between art and society, but few studies it in terms of the ontological values of Chinese Traditional Painting.Chinese Traditional Painting is an independent artistic system. It has evolved and been succeeded generation by generation from outlining and coloring and has layered a foundation of the features of Chinese painting language and the conceptions of Chinese painting modeling, which becomes a starting point of comprehending and observing Chinese Traditional Painting. Before Yuan Dynasty, the most important genre of paintings is the Fine Brush-Stroke Painting: it not only stands for the ontological development of Chinese painting and embodies the value taste of Chinese painting, but also incorporates many distinct aesthetic inclinations such as Academic Styled Painting, Artisan's Painting, and Literati Painting. Since Yuan Dynastiy, though Zhao Mengfu advocates 'ancient interest' and Chen Hongshou hopes 'a kind of accumulated achievement' and Hui Nantian worships 'profound tranquility', the Fine Brush-Stroke Painting is increasingly marginalized for its status in the history of painting. With the development of ink painting on paper, the brush strokes of texturing methods gradually take place of outlining and coloring to be the main impetus of the ontological development of Chinese painting. The value interests of Chinese paintings are shifted from painterliness to calligraphic quality, and the theoretic framework centered on the aura of ink-brush is established since then.The modern context in the 20^th century and the historical changes of Chinese society offer the Fine Brush-Stroke Painting the new opportunity of development. The predominant tendency for the transformation of Chinese Traditional Painting in the 20^th century is to use 'scientific realism' to correct the emptiness of painting since Ming and Qing Dynasties and the transcendentalist interests of Literati Painting by introducing western realist techniques and revive the motto of 'being excellent in representing objects' of Song Dynasty painting. In the past one hundred years the praxis of Chinese artists has made efforts to reconstruct the living attitude. The modern shift of the Fine Brush-Stroke Painting is one of the spectacular achievements in the transformation of Chinese Traditional Painting in the 20^th century. In 1950s and 1960s, the Fine Brush-Stroke Color Painting, as a canonic painting in the ancient times, combined with the folk painting tradition that are favored by the populace, has become the Calendar Painting and Comic Strip which aim at advocating the policies and guidelines of the Party and ensuring the literature and art serving the people. In this process, the canonic techniques adopted by the Fine Brush-Stroke Painting are incorporated with the western techniques in the wake of 'the western knowledge is introduced to the east'. The resurgence of the Fine Brush-Stroke Painting since 1980s and 1990s carries the contradictions of reality against history, nationality against internationality, and presents the multiple possibilities of modern transformation from the traditional cultural features and image modalities and the diversified values. Through the history of past one century, the Fine Brush-Stroke Painting means something different with different subjects, serving different purposes at the different periods and occasions and cultural levels, but it is also a same developmental line of pursuing Chinese Painting modernization.The modern development of the Fine Brush-Stroke Painting in the 20^th century is both formulated in the historical confrontation of the western introduction and created during the sequential process of Chinese historic civilization. In this historically changing process, what kind of western knowledge is involved in the modern reconstruction of the Fine Brush-Stroke Painting? What sort of values and formative elements from Chinese Traditional Painting value ontology play an important cultural creativity in the modern transformation of the Fine Brush-Stroke Painting?This paper starts from the tradition and modern development of the Fine Brush-Stroke Painting, elucidates flower-bird painting, landscape painting, and figure painting respectively. It studies the tradition of the Fine Brush-Stroke Painting formed during past hundreds of years in the system of Chinese Traditional Painting in order to work out the issue of modern transformation of Chinese Traditional Painting from the perspective of the value ontology of Chinese Traditional Painting, to visualize the world by way of Chinese history of civilization, and to recognize the development of modern Chinese Traditional Painting in the whole developmental sequence of Chinese art. As distinct from the general description of the Fine Brush-Stroke Painting, this paper places emphasis not on the individual artists who make up the history of painting, nor the separate works, but on the interactive relationship between the painter and works, subject and object, and therefore analyzes the endlessly succeeding connections in terms of its evolution until today. The paper aims at rethinking the inner coherence of the modern transformation of Chinese art, at reconsidering the foundation of the traditional Chinese civilization upon the modern Chinese culture, at extending the time-span and historical dimension to strengthen the profoundness and width of Chinese modern culture. In the present accelerating globalization, starting from the historic question and realistic situation of the Fine Brush-Stroke Painting, this paper proposes the statement of conscious excavation of civilization potential and cultural creativity from the Chinese historical civilization.