The Imperial Painting, The Literati Painting And The Zen Painting Of The Northern Song Dynasty

Chinese painting of Song Dynasty especially the Northern Song Dynasty is the peak period in its painting history not only because it inherits and carries forward the achievement achieved in Tang and Five Dynasties in the figure, birds-flower and landscape paintings draw on the artistic achievements and the artistic tradition, but because it summarize the aesthetics theory and completed system construction for Chinese painting history .In addition, it laid a basic pattern and set the basic direction for the development and evolution of the painting art. However, the current thesis and academic works paid too much attention to revealing and recovering painting techniques such as pen and ink technologies, but achieve little, if not much, in further exploring the inner spirit of the Northern Song Dynasty painting and the essence of the aesthetic structure of the deep and their relationship with Chinese traditional philosophy where this paper endeavor to seek a breakthrough.This article is divided into seven parts. Preface Part of this article reveal the purpose of the study subjects and the research methods described in three aspects: Imperial style, Literati style and Zen style. The boundaries among them are not clearly independent and isolated. The research methods of this article combined art history, aesthetic history, the history of philosophy to reveal the characteristics of pen and ink techniques of each styles, their aesthetic values and the root causes of thought.Chapter I overviews from a macro scope the overall outlook and historical characteristics of the Northern Song Dynasty painting. This chapter is divided into four sections: section I regards elegance-worshipping and popularity-despising as the main tendency of literary aesthetics on the field of painting. Section II works on the basis of the relevant exposition of its subject matter in painting to expose its maturity in painting techniques. Section III briefly reviews and sorts in the painting history of the Northern Song Dynasty on a wide range of values, as well as goes beyond the form of monotheism to carry out feasibility studies, and focus on analysing the deeply-seated causes of the intended target "not to pursuit resemblance". Section IV focuses on the emergence of expressionalism painting still lags behind the expressionism aesthetics of ancient China, pointing out that Chinese painting reversion from realism of the Pre-Qin Period and Wei- Jin Period to representation of Song Dynasty depends on the inherent laws of the philosophical and artistic thinking.Chapterâ…¡pursue specific analysis of the representative painters and their works of Imperial painting, Literati painting and Zen paintings. Taking into account the space limitations, this article select a single representative work from each artist's works. This can not be fully revealed the comprehensive appearance of each artist and their style, This is indeed regrettable, but it is consolable that this chapter has some o novel opinions, such as the "differences between Xuxi and Huangquan" ,thedifferent explanation about Wang Jiu-Jenq's famous work--the "the picture ofspinning wheel" and Yiyuanji's "the picture of monkey and cats" from that of Zhao Mengfu and so on.Chapterâ…¢firstly defined the aesthetic connotations of the realm of reality, the realm of emotion, the realm of rationality and set up correspondence with three painting styles. Then on the basis of sorting out the related opinions and other information about the painting aesthetics, this article list the representative opinions about the three realm given by famous artist and intellectuals of the Northern Song Dynasty. Then this article make clear the cross relationship among the three realms by focusing on analysis of Zhuangzi and Zen Aesthetic. In addition, this chapter compares the three aesthetic realm with the four aestheticranks--"Yi'V'Shen ","Miao","Neng" and tries to scheme the relationship betweenthem.Chapterâ…£reviews the history of thoughts of the Northern Song Dynasty, mainly from the perspective of the "emotion" concept and the "rationality" concept to find the root causes of thought and theoretical cornerstone of painting aesthetics of the Song Dynasty.Chapterâ…¤mainly focuses on the core of Literati paintings aesthetics.Literati paintings are the most important part in Chinese painting system .It connects the "realm of reality" with "the realm of rationality", it's the central linkage to understand the spiritual essence of Chinese painting. On the one hand, Zhuangzi and Zen both have different emphases on "emotion" and "rationality" respectively. These factors impact on the aesthetics of painting in many ways, for example, this article expose the distinct difference between Zhuangzi and Zen by citing in the well-known legends like "jieyipangbo" and "yuananwoxue"ect. The paper in addition certify from the philosophy of religion to start with the exposition, mainly from the "natural" and "freedom" as a distinction between two concepts key to the different aesthetic between Zhuang and Zen. Besides, Zhuang and Zen is not absolutely independent, there are much similarities between . The secularization of Zen in the Northern Song Dynasty at a large extent stems from Confucianism and Zhuang recognition and absorption, this secularization of the Zen at least from the external form of Confucianism and Taoism in the world affirmed the emotional and practical rationality of emotion, and lay solid theoretical foundation to the Imperial painting ,theLiterati painting and the Zen painting.