Ashmolean Eastern Art Online, Yousef Jameel Centre for Islamic and Asian Art

China’s writing system was standardized in the third century BC and within a few hundred years calligraphy was appreciated as an art form as well as being a means of communication. By the eleventh century, writing with ink and brush was highly regarded as a means of self-expression and sometimes as a way to judge a man’s character and education.

The use of calligraphic lines in landscape painting means painting was also viewed in those terms. The associations of painting and calligraphy with scholarship and official life have always been close. The approaches to painting - particularly landscapes - of the Song dynasty were maintained and reworked by subsequent generations of artists so that aspects of Song brushwork, composition and calligraphy are evident even in works of the twentieth century.

Painting of a figure, 1775, Hankou, by Min Zhen (1730-after 1788) (Museum no: EA1964.233.xii).

Hanging scrolls

Bird and lotus (EA1964.77)    Landscape with water buffalo (EA1964.82)    Landscape with mountains and a lake (EA1965.248)

Yunnan landscape (EA1965.258)    Seeking the Marvellous at Mount Huang (EA1966.86)    Chrysanthemum spray (EA1966.194)

Landscape with river and mountains (EA1966.195)    River and mountain landscape (EA1966.198)    Chicks (EA1967.15)

Mountain landscape with clouds (EA1967.131)    Eight Donkeys (EA1983.218)    River landscape with mountains (EA1991.191)

Mountain landscape (EA1978.406)

Bird paintings

Birds on a branch (EA1960.227)    Birds on a flowering branch (EA1965.231)    Flower and bird (EA2007.191)

Bird on a branch (EA1972.25)    Birds on a flowering branch (EA1960.221)    A pair of swallows flying over a pool (EAX.5345.c)

Two birds on a branch (LI2062.1)