Spiritual Dimensions In The Chinese Landscapes

Natural scenes express certain spiritual moods. The spiritual dimension that is particularly highlighted in the Chinese poetry tradition is not only the "soul" of Chinese traditional landscape paintings but also the spiritual theme of Chinese contemporary oil paintings of landscapes. "Poems are paintings with sounds, paintings are soundless poems." Such a traditional idea endows poems with boundless space of imaginations and paintings with impressive spiritual dimensions. What revealed from the western classic landscape painting is an aesthetic concept with the love for the nature, the life, and realistic depictions. Different from the western tradition, Chinese traditional landscape artists stress on the harmonious relationship between the individual spiritual world of the man and the natural world, pursuing a cosmological state of integration between man and the nature. Such a traditional cosmological ideal has laid solid theoretical and spiritual foundation for the Chinese landscape painting system, with which the artists reach the spiritual home of their own in the painting.Traditional Confucian thoughts constitute the Chinese traditional moral system. The kind man is fond of mountains; the wise man is fond of water and rivers." As this classic Confucian saying indicates that there are countless and close interconnections between the natural world and the moral characters, behaviors, and hobbies of the man.Further more, the concept of "qi" (energy/breath) plays an important role in the Chinese traditional landscape paintings. "Qi" runs through mountains and rivers and endows these natural elements with spiritual dimensions. Integration between human and the nature in the real sense is therefore realized.Based on the deep thinking on the western classic landscape painting and modern arts, Chinese landscape painting artists re-evaluate the traditional culture and explore the value of Chinese contemporary oil paintings of landscapes. They abstract spiritual elements from the understanding on both western and eastern paintings and create a unique style of Chinese oil painting of landscapes with strong national aesthetic features.