page_title: History of painting
section_title: Chinese oil paintings
hierarchical_section_title: History of painting / Eastern / East Asian / Chinese / Chinese oil paintings
context_page_description: The history of painting reaches back in time to artifacts from pre-historic humans, and spans all cultures. It represents a continuous, though periodically disrupted, tradition from Antiquity. Across cultures, and spanning continents and millennia, the history of painting is an ongoing river of creativity, that continues into the 21st century. Until the early 20th century it relied primarily on representational, religious and classical motifs, after which time more purely abstract and conceptual approaches gained favor.
  Developments in Eastern painting historically parallel those in Western painting, in general, a few centuries earlier. African art, Jewish art, Islamic art, Indian art, Chinese art, and Japanese art each had significant influence on Western art, and vice versa.
  Initially serving utilitarian purpose, followed by imperial, private, civic, and religious patronage, Eastern and Western painting later found audiences in the aristocracy and the middle class. From the Modern era, the Middle Ages through the Renaissance painters worked for the church and a wealthy aristocracy.
context_section_description: Western techniques of oil paintings began entering China in the 19th century, becoming prevalent among Chinese artists and art students in the early 20th century, coinciding with China's growing engagement with the West. Artists such as Li Tiefu, Hong Yi, Xu Beihong, Yan Wenliang, Lin Fengmian, Fang Ganmin, Pang Yuliang went abroad, predominantly to Paris and Tokyo, to learn Western art. Through them, artistic movements such as Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, Post-impressionism grew and thrived in China, only halted by the Second World War and the birth of the People's Republic of China, when modernistic artistic styles were seen as being inconsistent with the prevailing political ideals and realism was the only acceptable artistic form. Nonetheless, the legacy of the close engagement with Western art in the early 20th century endured. Oil paintings survived as a important medium in Chinese artistic scenes; traditional Chinese ink paintings were also changed as a result.
caption: Muromachi period, Shingei (1431–1485), Viewing a Waterfall, Nezu Museum, Tokyo.[23]
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