Hello everybody. Today, we will continue discussing Chinese art, and this time we will focus on Chinese paintings. I am Julius, I am from Lithuania. I am Zhang Bin. Both Julius and I I teaches at Neinjing University. There is also a third person, teachers Zho Min who couldn't come here, but she's the actual experts in the fields of Chinese art. We work as a team and Dr. Zhang and I, are going to present you our teamwork and discussion. Because of time constraints, we could not and we cannot tell everything what we could tell about Chinese paintings. So we chose three topics that we think are the most interesting. We will present these three topics are three questions. Yes. The first question is. Why Chinese paintings are usually not framed? The second question is why Chinese paintings are usually black and white? Almost no color. A third one is, are Chinese paintings abstract art? Dr. Zhang, so here I would like to ask you the first question. I actually never noticed that before, only recently I became aware of that. So the first question, why Chinese paintings are never framed? I will answer this question here. Generally, in the last, when someone mentions a painting, first the all, we will imagine an old painting in a museum. Is old painting on the wood would be framed and wet plants will be able to see the whole view. But in China, it's a completely different story. It does not matter if a painting is dependent on a frame or Chinese album book or on scroll. You can never immediately see the whole picture because it will only gradually scroll before your eyes. So among all these types of media where painting can be drawn, the scroll painting is probably the most important. We'll show you soon why. It's so important that even during the 18th Olympic games in 2008, during the opening ceremony the creators of the opening ceremony use the idea of scroll painting as a media where the show was being performed. This shows the significance of scroll painting in the hearts of Chinese people. We thought if someone from the West haven't heard much about Chinese paintings, they could ask a question. So how do you actually appreciate this kind of painting? Well, to enjoy the scroll painting is like taking a walk and opening scroll painting is like following its painter, seeing what he sees. We also have a choice of focusing on different details in the painting, and we can unhurriedly enjoy them until the whole picture of the scroll is being presented. This appreciation of a scroll painting is like journey where we never know in advance what will happen until the journey ends. There is always something that may surprise us in one way or another. So we chose one of the most famous paintings called [inaudible]. Yes. In a painting, there is scenery or painting capital during the [inaudible] and by scrolling the painting, we can feel as if we are inside of it, 1,000 years back. Walking in the streets, crossing small ridges, looking into the distance or the standing in one place, enjoying every detail of the capital's life. We can observe and experience how people lived during those facts. It's very vivid, very strong vivid. There is another very interesting aspect related to Chinese paintings and especially scroll paintings, and that's the aspects which we call multi-perspective. The fact that most of Chinese paintings, they have not one but several perspectives. Dr. Zhang here has something. Say something about multi-perspective Just now, by observing the painting, we could easily notice that Chinese paintings are in some ways flat by having only two dimensions. Not like with three-dimension paintings in the West, now also does not have one-point perspective. But it has many different points of perspectives as the scroll painting unfolds. We could call it multi-perspective style of painting where the paint has point of view is never fixed but obvious changes. Is quite different from the one-point perspective style of painting that popular after the reticence. So Julius, as a researcher of Chinese philosophy, can you just give me some explanations about this multiple perspective. My achievements in Chinese philosophy research is still very modest. But there are still a few things that I think I could say here. So first of all, we can easily find out that the aesthetic ideas behind the Chinese paintings and western painting are quite different. So the western ideal aesthetics of what is beautiful would be seen as fixed and I'm sorry for maybe overgeneralizing here but there is such standards. So in western paintings, even moving objects are fixed inside of the paintings, and they stay like that forever. To realize this idea that is very dominant and popular in the west, we are always looking for something that is constant eternal. Something that is stable. This idea I think is realizable using one perspective in the paintings. But for Chinese, it's really different story. They seek to find dao or the way and they want to find this dao in the movement. It's dynamic and the artists are achieved this moving dynamic expression of dow by constantly changing the point of perspective in the painting, and that makes the painting worldwide. It's also interesting that because of this, in Chinese paintings they very seldom use shades of light. So they achieve the results they want without using the shades. So that's what I would say about philosophy. So what my point is that Chinese paintings emphasizes the balance between people and nature, and both the process of growing and the process of enjoying let us realize that we are part of nature, and make a certain unity with that. A good example that illustrates the idea is a Chinese Traditional Garden. Because they are created by humans, but at the same time, it's gardens and there is fear that we are in nature. Yes. So before we move to our next question, while we were preparing this course, I realized that myself experienced this idea of scroll painting in China. I think the first time, more than 10 years ago from one of my colleagues, young Chinese lady, I got a present and that present was the painting that she drew. She drew and painted? Yes. So it was a nice painting. I remember it was a painting of flower and it's a pity I lost the painting later. The second time was quite recently. To one of my friends, I told about an interesting dream that once I had in China and he said, "I know I can draw it. I can draw your dream. Paint a dream? Yes, he painted my dream and yes he did it in a Chinese way, and in less than a week I got my dream painted. Wow. Recently, I suddenly became aware that in both cases the paintings where the scroll paintings, I don't have the exact painting but they actually look like this and they are almost of this size. I remember, by analyzing, found it usually Chinese paintings there, horizontal, the scroll paintings. There are also some that are vertical and we thought we can just show how it works. So this is one of the scroll paintings that looks somehow similar to one of my presence that I actually got in it. So we are scrolling, unfolding. Calligraphy is also an important part. Actually the calligraphy here as a poetry and we have flowers here. I guess everybody can get the idea how it feels and how it looks. Yes.
