The Evolution Of Animal Images In The History Chinese Visual Art

Animal used to be in a dominate status on the earth. However, with the emergence of mankind, animal have lost their old status, and gradually went to the edge of human culture, as a symbol of god worshiped by the human beings. The image of animals has been used in traditional visual art for a very long time. In the Bronze period of the Sang and Zhou dynasty, there was a strong collision between the culture of human being and the animal in those worship activities, and as a result, a kind of solemn and mysterious image of animal has been formed. In the Zhan dynasty, as the popularity of Tao and other Voodoos, animal has became a auxiliary power in some religious activities, such as helping human kind becoming immortal and the majestic stone sculpture of animal in Han dynasty guards the dead people beside of their graves. You can also see the changing of animal's role in the visual art in those horse paintings of Tang dynasty and some other paintings. The image of animals can been found anywhere in people's daily life, and at the same time it has affected their lives by its special function. Everyone has some instinct of animals at the bottom of their hearts, so with the development of our bodies, whether we should pay more attention to the importance of respecting other living creatures or not, whether we should pay more attention to the meaning of our own lives as well, and in which way we can use paintings to express the origin of life forms. In this essay, I will try to make a conclusion of the ways people in different dynasties used to care about animals, and the function of animal images in our paintings, as well as the relationship between ourselves and the natural environment.