Artifacts

A Brush with Wisdom

When Westerners first discovered Chinese paintings, they could not see their value. They wouldn't even acknowledge them as art. But, as Confucius noted, it is possible to look without seeing. If you learn to see beyond the surface of these paintings, you will discover their real beauty and find the deepest truths of the Chinese philosophies of life. Enter the hidden world of Chinese painting. What makes a Chinese painting so distinctive, so immediately recognizable as Chinese? Is it the subject matter that Chinese artists chose to paint? Is it the different tools and techniques that they used? Or is it how they saw what they were looking at? How do we begin to understand this unique painting tradition which has survived virtually unchanged for so many centuries? Well, in China, they say to understand painting you need to understand calligraphy - the art of writing Chinese characters with a brush.

Sacred Spaces

A very long time ago, far away in China, a villager living along the banks of the Yellow River built a simple mud hut to shelter his family. Thousands of years later in the year 1420, the empire's best craftsmen put the final touches on the ultimate masterpiece of Chinese architecture - the Temple of Heaven. Chinese buildings evolved from simple shelters into complex, magnificent structures with great, swooping roofs, stately columns, and rich detail. Between this simple mud hut and this amazingly complex structure - its every detail full of cosmological symbolism - is a tale of emperors, monks, scholars and genius craftsmen - a story which explains an architectural tradition of great beauty and flexibility. And to start this story at the beginning, we have to leap back two millennia, to when the brilliant tyrant Qin Shihuang becomes the first emperor of a unified China.