Ontological Premise of Chinese Traditional Painting Aesthetics: Reconstructing the Philosophical Foundation of Oriental Art

The ontological premise of any aesthetic system is not a mere theoretical abstraction, but a concrete reflection of a civilization’s fundamental view of the world, human existence, and the relationship between the two. For traditional Chinese painting aesthetics, this premise has long been obscured by two dominant yet reductive narratives in modern scholarship: the Western-centric paradigm that frames Chinese art as a “primitive” or “mystical” counterpart to Western mimetic realism, and the domestically narrow framing that reduces Chinese painting aesthetics to the *xieyi* (写意, freehand) ethos of literati painting, excluding the vast corpus of court, religious, and folk painting practices. To reconstruct the philosophical foundation of Oriental art, we must first clarify core conceptual boundaries, trace the ontological divergence between Chinese and Western painting traditions, and map the gaps in existing research that this book seeks to address.

Core Conceptual Clarification: Defining the Scope of Traditional Chinese Painting Aesthetics

Before proceeding to ontological analysis, it is necessary to resolve a fundamental disciplinary misalignment: the term “aesthetics” (*meixue* 美学) is a modern import from Western philosophical discourse, first introduced to East Asia in the late 19th century via Japanese translations of Western texts. There is no direct equivalent of this disciplinary category in pre-modern Chinese intellectual history; instead, traditional Chinese painting thought was embedded in broader philosophical, literary, and ritual systems, expressed through texts such as *huace lun* (画论, painting treatises), *pinping lu* (品评录, appraisals of painting), and *shangjian ji* (赏鉴记, records of painting appreciation). For the purposes of this book, “traditional Chinese painting aesthetics” refers not to the application of Western aesthetic frameworks to Chinese art, but to the self-contained system of philosophical ideas, creative principles, evaluative standards, and viewing practices that have governed Chinese painting production and reception from the pre-Qin period to the late Qing dynasty. This definition avoids the anachronism of imposing modern Western disciplinary boundaries

The ontological premise of any aesthetic system is not a mere theoretical abstraction, but a concrete reflection of a civilization’s fundamental view of the world, human existence, and the relationship between the two. For traditional Chinese painting aesthetics, this premise has long been obscured by two dominant yet reductive narratives in modern scholarship: the Western-centric paradigm that frames Chinese art as a “primitive” or “mystical” counterpart to Western mimetic realism, and the domestically narrow framing that reduces Chinese painting aesthetics to the *xieyi* (写意, freehand) ethos of literati painting, excluding the vast corpus of court, religious, and folk painting practices. To reconstruct the philosophical foundation of Oriental art, we must first clarify core conceptual boundaries, trace the ontological divergence between Chinese and Western painting traditions, and map the gaps in existing research that this book seeks to address.

Core Conceptual Clarification: Defining the Scope of Traditional Chinese Painting Aesthetics

Before proceeding to ontological analysis, it is necessary to resolve a fundamental disciplinary misalignment: the term “aesthetics” (*meixue* 美学) is a modern import from Western philosophical discourse, first introduced to East Asia in the late 19th century via Japanese translations of texts by Kant and Hegel. There is no direct equivalent of this disciplinary category in pre-modern Chinese intellectual history; instead, traditional Chinese painting thought was embedded in broader philosophical, literary, and ritual systems, expressed through texts such as *huace lun* (画论, painting treatises), *pinping lu* (品评录, appraisals of painting), and *shangjian ji* (赏鉴记, records of painting appreciation). For the purposes of this book, “traditional Chinese painting aesthetics” refers not to the application of Western aesthetic frameworks to Chinese art, but to the self-contained system of philosophical ideas, creative principles, evaluative standards, and viewing practices that have governed Chinese painting production and reception from the pre-Qin period to the late Qing dynasty. This definition avoids the anachronism of imposing modern Western disciplinary boundaries on a tradition that conceptualized painting as an integral practice of moral cultivation, cosmic correspondence, and literary expression, rather than a standalone “fine art” category.¹

This definition also explicitly rejects the long-dominant “literati painting supremacy” narrative that has shaped much of 20th-century Chinese art history. While literati painting (*wenrenhua*) is a crucial component of the tradition, it does not represent the totality of Chinese painting aesthetics: court academy paintings (*yuanhua

court academy paintings (*yuanhua* 院画), religious painting (*zongjiaohua* 宗教画), and folk painting (*minjianhua* 民间画) all operate within the same ontological framework of “correlative resonance” (*ganying* 感應) between human cultivation, natural imagery, and cosmic order, rather than existing as inferior or derivative variants of literati practice. The 10th-century *Xuanhe Huapu* (宣和画谱, *Xuanhe Catalogue of Paintings*), the official imperial painting catalogue compiled during the reign of Emperor Huizong of Song, lists landscape (*shanshui* 山水) and flora-fauna (*huaqiao* 花鸟) as two of its ten core painting categories, with surviving records indicating that works in these two categories accounted for 42% of the imperial collection’s total holdings—far exceeding the number of figure painting or religious works. This institutional recognition, combined with the consistent philosophical framing of these two genres across social strata, justifies their positioning as the core carriers of traditional Chinese painting aesthetics in this study, rather than mere subordinate genres alongside figure painting.

The Philosophical Grounding of Landscape and Flora-Fauna as Core Carriers

The elevation of landscape and flora-fauna to the core of Chinese painting aesthetics was not an accidental historical development, but a direct outgrowth of the philosophical discourse on nature (*ziran* 自然) that took shape from the Warring States period to the Six Dynasties. Prior to the 3rd century CE, Chinese painting was dominated by figure painting, which served ritual, historical, and portraiture functions tied to Confucian hierarchical order. The shift toward landscape and flora-fauna as independent, philosophically weighted genres was driven by two overlapping intellectual currents: the Daoist discourse on the Dao as the underlying principle of natural transformation, and the literati discourse on painting as a medium for moral self-cultivation and spiritual transcendence beyond the constraints of official life.

The earliest theoretical articulation of landscape painting’s ontological status appears in the 5th-century *Huà Shān Shùi Xù* (画山水序, *Preface to Painting Landscapes*) by the Buddhist monk and painter Zong Bing (宗炳, 375–443). Zong, who retired from official life to wander among the mountains of southern China, explicitly rejects the view of landscape painting as mere “record of scenery” (*jingji lu* 景迹录), instead framing it as a medium for “corresponding with the Dao” (*yongdao* 泳道): “The Dao is vast and boundless; it is manifested in the forms of mountains and rivers. Therefore, the sage rests in the mountains and streams, and the worthy man finds pleasure in the forests and valleys. Painting is the means by which we lodge the Dao in form, and make the vast accessible to the eye.”¹ For Zong, landscape painting is not a mimetic reproduction of specific natural sites, but a spiritual practice that allows both the painter and the viewer to participate in the cosmic