A Study On Jie Painting In The Song And Yuan Dynasties

Jie Painting，which literally means boundary painting, is a genre thatis typically Chinese. It differs from other types of traditional Chinesepainting in that it employs lines as its chief way of delineation and takesas its subjects of painting buildings such as palaces, pavilions, towers,and terraces, tools such as boats,Panche（a type of vehicle in ancientChina) and water mills, and furniture such as screens, oblong desks, andsmall tables.Jie Painting can be defined both broadly and narrowly.Regarding its way of depiction, it can be divided into two types, thedifference between which is whether assistive tools such as Jie paintingbrushes, rulers are used or not. Regarding its objects of painting, it can bedivided into Jie Painting proper, landscape Jie Painting, figure JiePainting and flower-and-bird Jie Painting.In its heyday in the Song andYuan Dynasties, a large quantity of Jie Paintings was created, manyof which are still extant today. The present paper makes a systematicstudy of the history of Jie Painting by employing such methods ascorroborating comments with observation of Jie Paintings, literatureresearch, and iconological approach in an effort to offer a panoramic viewof its historical development. It also aims to summarize the artisticfeatures of Jie Painting in the Song and Yuan Dynasties and to probe intothe factors that contributed to the rise and decline of this genre of painting.It is hoped that the present study will do its bit for the research of JiePainting in particular and for furthering the cause of modern painting ingeneral.This paper is organized as follows.Firstly, it probes into the origin and development of Jie Painting soas to place the study in a historical perspective and lay a solid foundationfor the research into Jie Painting in the Song and Yuan Dynasties, whichforms the body of this paper.Secondly, Jie Painting，which flourished in the Song Dynasty, building on the achievements of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdomsperiod(AD907~960), began to decline in the Yuan Dynasty. Apart fromthe features of Jie Painting itself, this rise and decline of this genre ofpainting can be traced back to the politics, economy, culture, andemergence of a large number of cities and towns at that time.Theflourishing of Jie Painting pushed forward the development of the art ofpainting as a whole, making the Song Dynasties one of the peaks in thehistory of traditional Chinese painting.Thirdly, the steep decline of Jie Painting in the Yuan Dynasty fromits peak in the Song Dynasties manifests itself in the sharp decrease in thenumber of painters engaged in producing this genre of painting and theirplummeting output. The most fundamental reason for this, of course, isthe flagging interest in Jie Painting on the part of its patrons, namely, theruling class.But the divergence between Jie Painting and the art ofpainting as whole in terms of their artistic pursuit also plays annon-negligible role.Fourthly, the precipitous decline of Jie Painting from its peak in theSong Dynasty can be attributed to its limitation in techniques and thechanges in aesthetic approaches.And finally, although Jie Painting as a genre has long since fadedinto history, it still has its place in the history of traditional Chinesepainting by virtue of the impact it exerted on the development of art ofpainting in China. The rise and decline of Jie Painting is the externalmanifestation of the way painting progresses from one stage to another.