Chinese Painting and Calligraphy
The line of the brush itself becomes beauty, a principle entirely apart from oil painting, present in East Asia since ancient times. Near the end of the 5th century, a man named Xie He wrote down six criteria for judging a painting. The first of them was qiyun shengdong, spirit resonance and life movement. Whether a painting carries living breath comes before whether its forms resemble their subject. That ordering would go on to shape how East Asia looks at painting ever since. Landscape painting reaches a settled form under the Song dynasty, though it had been painted well before that, and Guo Xi's Early Spring, from 1072, is one high point of that arrival. This current crosses the sea and becomes Japanese ink painting. A word about calligraphy, too. In East Asia writing was placed above painting, and its summit is Wang Xizhi's Preface to the Orchid Pavilion Gathering. On the third day of the third month of 353, forty-one people met at the Orchid Pavilion to compose poems, and Wang wrote the preface on the spot. The original no longer exists. Emperor Taizong of Tang acquired it, had Chu Suiliang, Feng Chengsu and others make several copies, and — so it is said — had the original buried with him in his tomb at Zhaoling. Not one authentic work by Wang Xizhi survives anywhere. Everything held in the world's museums is a copy. The writing placed above everything else in East Asia for well over a thousand years is something nobody has ever seen the original of. Copies keep coming up on this map — Roman marbles, the digital Dunhuang, the replica caves — and this may be the most thorough case of all. With no original at all, a copy can carry something a thousand years.