Chinese Calligraphy and Painting: Brush, Ink and Empty Space

What are the four treasures of the study?

Brush, ink stick, paper and inkstone — bi, mo, zhi and yan. The brush is a tapered bundle of animal hair, most often goat, wolf or a mix, mounted in bamboo; a single brush can cost RMB 30 or RMB 3,000 depending on the hair and the maker.

Ink is a solid stick of pine soot and glue, ground with water on a stone inkstone until it reaches the right density. Grinding takes two to three minutes and is part of the practice rather than a chore — it sets the pace and settles the hand.

The paper is xuan paper from Anhui, sized so that ink spreads in a controlled way. Ink absorption is the whole game: too fast and the stroke blurs, too slow and it looks dead. Western watercolour paper behaves nothing like it.

What are the five scripts of Chinese calligraphy?

Five, in order of increasing speed: seal (zhuanshu), clerical (lishu), regular (kaishu), running (xingshu) and cursive (caoshu). Each is still used, and each has a different social function.

Seal script is the archaic form, uniform in line width and now mostly found on carved seals and logos. Clerical script, with its flared strokes, was the Han dynasty administrative hand. Regular script is the balanced upright form that children learn first and that most printed type is based on.

Running script is fluid but legible, the hand used for letters and notes; cursive is abbreviated to the point of abstraction and is closer to painting than to communication. Wang Xizhi's Lanting Xu, written in 353 CE, is running script and remains the most imitated work in Chinese art.

Why does Chinese landscape painting leave so much blank?

Because the blank paper is doing the work. In shanshui — literally mountain-water — unpainted areas are mist, water, cloud and distance. Filling the sheet would remove the depth, so the emptiness is composition rather than absence.

The painting is also not a view from a fixed point. Chinese landscape uses shifting perspective and is often designed to be read over time, unrolled section by section on a table, rather than seen whole on a wall.

Brush and ink are shared with calligraphy, and the critical move is the same: one stroke, one breath, uncorrectable. That is why connoisseurs talk about a painter's line quality the way musicians talk about tone.

A short history in four moments

Oracle bone and bronze inscriptions from the Shang and Zhou dynasties, roughly 1200–256 BCE, are the earliest Chinese writing: divination records carved on bone and cast into bronze vessels.

The Qin unification of the script around 221 BCE and the Han adoption of clerical script created a standard written language across dialects that are still not mutually intelligible when spoken.

The Tang dynasty (618–907) produced figure painting and the great regular-script masters; the Song (960–1279) took landscape to its peak, with monumental scrolls by Fan Kuan and Guo Xi.

The Yuan and Ming dynasties turned painting into a literati pursuit — scholars painting for each other, adding poems and seals to the same sheet, so that a finished work carries calligraphy, poetry and painting in one object.

Where to see it, and where to try it

The essential museums are the Palace Museum in Beijing, the Shanghai Museum, the Shaanxi History Museum in Xi'an and the National Palace Museum in Taipei, which holds the largest single collection of imperial Chinese painting.

For live context: the Forest of Steles in Xi'an holds more than 3,000 stone tablets spanning 2,000 years, and Hangzhou's China Academy of Art district is the modern centre for ink painting. Both are easy half-days.

Try it yourself in a 90-minute studio session: RMB 150–300 with a teacher, covering brush handling, the eight basic strokes and a finished character to take home. Our Xi'an and Hangzhou days include one — see /destinations/xian/ and /destinations/hangzhou/.

Last updated: 2026-10-02 · Reviewed by JoyoTour