Comparison Between The Traditional Chinese Painting And The Traditional Western Painting In Aspect Of Space Expression

The space in painting refers to the virtual space created by the painters on the two-dimensional plane through some techniques of expression. The traditional Chinese painting and the traditional Western painting are distinct from each other in aspect of techniques of space expression due to different national way of thinking, local culture and aesthetic taste. In traditional Chinese painting, it expresses things through mobile views and processes and combines the objects in different times and spaces according to the demand of artistic creation, reflecting the unique space structure of "small by the big view"; while the traditional Western painting focuses on reproducing faithfully the real space and imitating the objects; it uses the scientific and rational perspective rules to show the objective real space that people see through a fixed view.The Song Dynasty of Ancient China and the European Renaissance obtained the tremendous achievement in and demonstrated the typical characteristics of the space expression in traditional Chinese painting and Western painting respectively. The artists of Song Dynasty, though not using the principle of focus perspective to express the three-dimensional space, had their own way for showing real objects and real space. The ruled-line painting of Song Dynasty especially acts as the model of painting realism in object space for traditional Chinese painting. Both the ruled-line painting of Song Dynasty and the renaissance painting pursue the true expression and adopt the artistic technique of exquisiteness and preciseness; but they are utterly different in space expression, which stems from their enriched cultural connotation and national characteristics. This deserves our attention and thinking.This paper analyzes the different space expression rules of the ruled-line painting of Song Dynasty and the Renaissance painting based on their different techniques of space expression. Firstly, this paper has done an in-depth analysis of the space expression origins and causes of the two kinds of paintings from the aspects of cultural origins, space form history and material & medium of China and the West. Secondly, it analyzes the features in the form of space expression of the two kinds of paintings base on related works; then it discusses how the space construction of traditional Chinese and Western paintings can inspire the contemporary painting creation. The techniques of space expression are different between the ruled-line painting of Song Dynasty and the Renaissance painting, but they both pursue the artistic truth. The traditional Chinese painting tries to express an ideal real space freely and flexibly while the western artists represent people’s visual reality by means of scientific perspective. Meanwhile, both the traditional Chinese painting artists and Western painting artists believe that perspective is only a means for space expression, and artists can use imagination and exaggeration freely as needed to show the free consciousness of space.In the context of globalization, the cultural exchanges between China and the West are more frequent. The comparison helps to recognize the value of the space expression in both parties. The contemporary art should inherit the essence of the traditional painting, absorb the excellent art concepts and techniques of expression in the West and produce the space of painting which presents the contemporary style and retains the characteristic of Chinese culture; such form of artistic expression is the correct one which we should applyto contemporary painting creation.