History of painting

Mounting is an ancient industry. 1973 silk paintings of emperors and dragons unearthed from Chu tombs in the Warring States Period in Hunan Province and silk paintings unearthed from Han tombs No.1 in Mawangdui, Changsha, are all on T-shaped silk paintings, wrapped with bamboo poles and tied with brown ribbons, and the two lower corners in the middle and lower parts are decorated with cylindrical tapestries woven with blue fine linen. These characteristics show the origin of ancient painting and calligraphy mounting. It has a history of more than two thousand years.

The earliest record of mounting historical materials was Zhang Yanyuan's Record of Famous Paintings in Past Dynasties in Tang Dynasty, which mentioned: "The Jin Dynasty has been a long time, and the back mounting was not good, and it was not until the Song Dynasty that it could be mounted." Fan Hua, the author of the Book of the Later Han Dynasty and a historian of the Southern Song Dynasty, is an early famous figure in the history of mounting in China. Emperor Taizong made great efforts to collect Wang Xizhi's calligraphy and famous paintings of past dynasties, appointed Wang Hang to mount them directly, and Chu Suiliang and Wang Zhijing supervised them, which shows that the Tang Dynasty attached importance to mounting paintings. At that time, Nakagawa from Nara came to China to study mounting technology, and Emperor Taizong personally ordered Zhang Yanyuan to teach mounting technology. Since then, China's mounting technology has spread to Japan, and has taken root, sprouted, blossomed and borne fruit in foreign countries.

In the Five Dynasties, mounting technology was further developed. In the Northern Song Dynasty, the Song Dynasty established the Painting Academy, which became one of the six outstanding imperial edicts of the Academy. Under the advocacy of the royal family and on the basis of careful exploration by painters and mounters, the famous "Xuan He Mounting" format was finally formed. This also marks the beginning of the spread of China's painting and calligraphy mounting skills to the people. Especially in the five hundred years of Ming and Qing dynasties, mounting technology became a specialized industry, and many well-known painting and calligraphy mounting shops appeared in Suzhou, Yangzhou, Beijing, Shanghai, Hunan, Hubei and Kaifeng.