One of the major styles of Chinese painting, shan-shui first arose to prominence during the 5th century, the Song Dynasty (Soper). This style of painting depicts scenery or natural landscapes, using a brush and ink rather than more
One of the major styles of Chinese painting, shan-shui first arose to prominence during the 5th century, the Song Dynasty (Soper). This style of painting depicts scenery or natural landscapes, using a brush and ink rather than more conventional paints. The literal translation of shan-shui breaks down into two words; shan is mountain or mountains, and shui which means bodies of water which includes waterfalls, rivers, and lakes. Most of the shan-shui painters produced large-scale landscape paintings, which were usually centered on mountains. Mountains have long been seen as scared places in China since the deities supposedly resided there and that they were closer to the heavens (Yee and Hsiung). Like many other styles of Chinese painting, shan-shui has a strong reference to Taoist imagery and motifs, as the symbolism of Taoism strongly influenced “Chinese landscape painting” (Northrop).
It has been noted that the Taoist stress on how minor the human presence is in the vastness of the cosmos, and this can been seen in shan-shui styled paintings, where there are often no human presence in the piece or human presence is greatly diminished by their size in comparison. Most dictionary definitions of shan-shui often assume that the term includes all ancient Chinese paintings with mountain and water images (Siren). Although contemporary Chinese painters feel that only paintings with mountain and water images that follow strict guidelines should be classified as shan-shui style. It should be noted that when Chinese painters work on shan-shui painting, they do not try to portray an image that they actually saw in nature, but how they felt from nature. Thus shan-shui painting is not actually depicting nature as how nature appears, but how the artist views the landscape (Maeda). According to Ch’eng His, shan-shui painting is more like a vehicle of philosophy.
Shan-shui paintings involve a complicated and rigorous set of almost mystical requirements for balance, composition, and form (Wicks). They should have 3 basic components: paths, the threshold, and the heart. The path has certain characteristics: it should never be straight; it should meander like a stream. This helps deepen the landscape by adding layers. It can be a river or a path along it, or the tracing of the sun through the sky over the shoulder of the mountain (Siren). The mastery of the path is not to create inorganic patterns