Ink painting

Ink painting emerged in China during the Tang dynasty (618–907), reached its height in the Song and Yuan dynasties, and developed in its own ways in China, Korea and Japan. Ink is the main pigment, sometimes with a light wash of colour. Another kind of ink-only picture, plain line drawing (baimiao), relies on outlines; what marks ink painting is its use of gradations and blurring of ink to render surfaces. Japan’s Nipponica encyclopedia notes that Zhang Yanyuan’s Lidai minghua ji, written late in the Tang, said of the early Tang painter Yin Zhongrong that he used ink and yet had all five colours: there is nothing on the surface but lighter and darker black, and the viewer takes it as a picture in colour, a way of looking that ink painting needed before it could stand on its own. The two basic ways of handling ink are ‘broken ink’ (破墨) and ‘splashed ink’ (潑墨), which have been explained in various ways; as Nipponica describes them, broken ink lays down pale ink first and adds dark ink over it, building volume from the contrast, while splashed ink ignores outlines and pours ink onto the surface to bring out a form in one go. The brushes and ink are the same as those used for calligraphy, and a stroke, once made, cannot be changed or erased. Landscape is by far the most common subject, and the scenes are usually imagined or only loosely based on real views.

Find the darkest and the palest ink, then look at the areas left blank: are they sky, water or mist?

• Literati painting 文人畫→Literati painting, the scholars’ tradition of painting mostly in ink, has its own card.