China:The Glorious Tang And Song Dynasties - Asian Art Museum ...

• Copying works of art was an accepted practice during the Tang and Song dynasties. It was considered
an important means of learning. Valuable writings were engraved on stone blocks (stele)
and these could be copied again using ink rubbings. Artists also copied earlier paintings; in fact,
we know about many Tang artists only through later copies. (One might compare this to our
knowledge of ancient Greek statues through later Roman copies.)
2. DEFINING THE ROLE OF THE ARTIST AND THE DIFFERENT MARKETS THAT THEY SERVED
What can be said about artists during the Tang and Song dynasties? The vast majority of people
who created the works that have survived were anonymous artisans and tradesmen (or in some cases
women). They may have moved around from place to place seeking employment. Some may have
been farmers, who became part-time craftsmen when they were not needed in the fields harvesting
or planting crops. Some were specialized stone carvers or bronze workers. Others specialized in clay,
how to fire kilns, or how to raise silk worms. These workers were responding, just like today’s workers,
to issues of trade, competition, taste and fashion, marketplace dictates, and new ideas from elsewhere.
As we shall see from the many examples of ceramic wares, tastes changed frequently, and
styles fell in and out of favor. Workers had to be inventive; they had to be willing to adjust, to
experiment, and to learn new skills in order to survive.
During the Tang-Song periods, there was a class of educated artists—initially working at court,
but later working in their own private domains—who began to produce works of art that were
judged more for their aesthetic criteria than their economic or utilitarian value. These scholarartists,
sometimes referred to as literati, or wen-ren (cultured person) developed their own criteria,
their own art criticism, even their own art history. We know very few artists’ names before the Tang
dynasty, but from the Tang and Song dynasties onward, we know the names of many, even if only a
few reliable works of art by these artists have survived. We know about these artists names because
the scholar-artists began to write about them, and many of their writings have come down to us.
Tang- and Song-dynasty calligraphers and painters were educated through a rigorous system of
examinations based largely on knowledge of classic literature, set down by the followers of
Confucius and institutionalized during the Han dynasty. During the Tang dynasty, the intervening
Five Kingdoms period, and the Song, talented painters became part of official court academies.
These academies had demanding and rigorous standards, and put artists in close proximity to the
emperor himself. The painting and calligraphy examples in this packet were produced by scholarartists
working mostly at court. It should be noted that trained artists would have been expected to
be proficient in a number of art forms—painting, calligraphy, poetry, and so on. The principal tool
of such artists was brush and ink.
By the Song dynasty, some artists began to question the kinds of standards developed at court
academies, rejecting "professional” values in favor of highly personal or “amateur” values. (This
dichotomy became a defining theme for painting in the following period, the Yuan dynasty.) In a
parallel development, the Tang and Song witnessed the rise of calligraphy as a high art form,
through the adoption of past masters as models of orthodox style; some more progressive and idiosyncratic
calligraphers began to reject these official styles championing instead very personal forms
of calligraphic expression. The proliferation of new styles of painting and calligraphy—whether
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