Gongbi and xieyi

Gongbi is the careful, realist technique of Chinese painting. It uses highly detailed brushstrokes that mark out details very precisely, without expressive variation in the line; it is often richly coloured and usually depicts figures or narrative subjects. It began about two thousand years ago in the Han dynasty and peaked between the Tang and Song dynasties (seventh to thirteenth centuries), when such paintings were endorsed and collected by the imperial family. Xieyi is its opposite. The word literally means ‘writing ideas’, and the manner was promoted by the literati: it describes things with spare brushwork, does not chase physical likeness, and tries to grasp the most essential spirit of the subject, giving room to the painter’s personality. The Japanese edition of the Britannica International Encyclopaedia says xieyi depicts not only the thing itself but what the painter means to entrust to the picture, and cites the Song writer Su Shi: to judge a painting by likeness of form is to see as a child sees. The two also tend to use different paper, ‘cooked’ Xuan paper for gongbi and ‘raw’ Xuan paper for xieyi. The National Palace Museum’s exhibition 此處有鬚 gathers figures with beards from all kinds of paintings, some of them, in its words, painted meticulously and some simply.

Look closely at fine parts such as hair, beards, feathers or leaf veins: are the lines even and separate, or varied in tone and done in one sweep?

• Literati painting 文人畫→Xieyi was promoted by the literati; literati painting has its own card.