Course Schedule and Catalog

Department: Asian Studies

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Course Type: Lecture

Credit Hours: 3

Description: Traditional Chinese painting was the art of the movements of the brush. This course examines the brushwork from sevral perspectives: as performance; as expression of the artist's moral chracter; and as a system of codes and gestures borrowed from the art of calligraphy. We consider how historically shifting understanding of the brushwork served to express diverse aesthetic, social, and cultural concerns: the cosmological and political significance of writing; the function of pictorial expression; the distinction between professional and literati painters; and the notion of the pictorial canon. Also offered as HART 371.