Conversations on Chinese Landscape Painting

Nine in-depth conversations tackle key questions about landscape painting: Why do Chinese people love painting landscapes? What changes and developments has landscape painting undergone over the past thousand years? How does Chinese landscape painting differ from Western landscape painting? What is the relationship between the brushwork of landscape painting and calligraphy? How do a painter's cultivation and temperament shape their work? How should people today approach the landscape-painting tradition?

As early as the Northern and Southern Dynasties, Zong Bing laid the foundations for the theory of landscape painting in his Preface on Landscape Painting. Painters in every subsequent dynasty created countless masterpieces, which remain an inexhaustible source of inspiration for artists today. This book brings together conversations between Xu Qinsong and nine art historians and critics: Shao Dazhen, Lang Shaojun, Xue Yongnian, Pan Gongkai, Yi Ying, Zhu Liangzhi, Yin Jinan, Yu Hui, and Wu Weishan. Progressing step by step in an accessible yet insightful way, they discuss the Chinese landscape-painting tradition and how to renew the meaning of landscape painting in the modern and contemporary eras.

To discuss landscape painting is both to interpret the works of the past and to express oneself. Enter the conversation and transmigrate through a thousand years alongside classic paintings, tracing the roots of Chinese aesthetic sensibilities.