What are the three categories of Chinese paintings

Chinese painting usually consists of 3 categories: landscape, birds and flowers, and figures.

The main types of Chinese paintings represented are: figure painting, landscape painting, ink painting, courtyard painting, brush painting, literati painting, ink cartooning, flower and bird painting, and neo-literati painting.

1. Figure Painting

(1) As one of the traditional painting disciplines in China, the content is mainly depicting people. With different emphasis on painting, it can be divided into portrait painting and character story and custom painting.

(2) According to records, figure painting reached a high standard during the Spring and Autumn Period. One can see the achievement of figure painting at that time from the excavated silk paintings of Chu tombs in the Warring States period, and figure painting has been the main painting subject in traditional Chinese painting.

2. Landscape Painting

(1) It is one of the subjects of Chinese painting, mainly depicting the natural scenery of mountains and rivers.

(2) It began to develop during the Wei, Jin and Six Dynasties, but was generally used as a background for figure paintings; it was not until the Sui and Tang dynasties that a lot of independent landscape paintings began to be produced; after the Five Dynasties and the Northern Song Dynasty, it gradually matured, with a variety of authors, and has since become a major painting discipline in Chinese painting.

(3) Its main forms are blue and green, gold and blue, bone-less, light-red, ink and so on, and it is mainly concerned with the management of the position and the expression of the mood in the artistic expression.

3. Bird and Flower Painting

(1) As one of China's traditional painting. It mainly depicts flowers, bamboo and stones, birds and animals, insects and fish as the main body of the picture.

(2) Four or five thousand years ago, simple fish and bird patterns appeared on pottery, which can be regarded as the earliest bird and flower paintings. According to the record, in the Tang Dynasty, Zhang Yanyuan's Record of Famous Paintings of All Ages, during the Eastern Jin Dynasty and the Southern Dynasties, flower paintings on silk had slowly formed an independent painting discipline and some specialized painters had appeared. Until the Five Dynasties and the two Song dynasties, flower and bird painting became more mature.

Boundary Painting

(1) It belongs to one of the families of Chinese painting. In Ming Tao Zongyi's book "Dropout Records", it is proposed that painting be divided into thirteen sections: statues of Buddha and Bodhisattva, the Jade Emperor and the king of the Tao, vajra ghosts and deities, winds and clouds, dragons and tigers, characters of the past life, the whole territory of landscapes, flowers and bamboo and plumes, beasts and wild animals, earthly animals, boundary painting, buildings and terraces, all the side of the life, cultivation and weaving and sculpture of the green embedded in the green.

(2) Among them, there is a section of the boundary painting platform, mainly refers to the palace, platforms, buildings and other buildings as the subject matter, and the boundary of the brush with a straight ruler to draw the line of the paintings can also be called "palace" or "house wood".