Quotes & Sayings About Chinese Art

I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect. — Madeleine L'Engle

One of my inspirations, Harry Houdini, remains an icon of the art because he defied our primal fears. His demonstrations in the early 20th century, especially his escape from the Chinese water torture cell, represented triumph over suffocation, drowning, disorientation and helplessness. — Criss Angel

There's a Chinese proverb that says it all: Painting is an old man's art. — David Hockney

The snapshots in CHINA: Portrait of a People are not meant to be works of art. I was too preoccupied with participating, with reveling in the moment, to worry about their perfection. Their purpose, then, is to form a candid portrait of China exactly as China presented itself to me. — Tom Carter

I don't mind 800 million Chinese drinking a bottle [of Coca-Cola] a day, but I don't want them to bring back the empties. — Art Buchwald

If we're stuck on one world, we're limited to a single case; we don't know what else is possible. Then - like an art fancier familiar only with Fayoum tomb paintings, a dentist who knows only molars, a philosopher trained merely in NeoPlatonism, a linguist who has studied only Chinese, or a physicist whose knowledge of gravity is restricted to falling bodies on Earth - our perspective is foreshortened, our insights narrow, our predictive abilities circumscribed. By contrast, when we explore other worlds, what once seemed the only way a planet could be turns out to be somewhere in the middle range of a vast spectrum of possibilities. When we look at those other worlds, we begin to understand what happens when we have too much of one thing or too little of another. We learn how a planet can go wrong. — Carl Sagan

We recognize the distinctness of Asian art when we turn to its traditional forms, recognize it as Japanese, Chinese and Indian, even Balinese or Thai. — F. Sionil Jose

I'm getting more and more into Chinese art and Japanese, some of those scroll paintings are amazing. You follow the change of the seasons. It's really something. These guys were great masters and of course the use of space. — Robert Barry

Do not set out to make Mexican art, or American, Chinese, or Russian art. Think in terms of universality. — Rufino Tamayo

What the art historians had forgotten is that in Chinese, Japanese, Persian, and Indian art, they never painted shadows. Why did they paint shadows in European art? Shadows are because of optics. Optics need shadows and strong light. Strong light makes the deepest shadows. It took me a few years to realize fully that the art historians didn't grasp that. There are a lot of interesting new things, ideas, pictures. — David Hockney

I'm very much involved with Asian art and its theory and practice, mainly Chinese because that was quite sophisticated. I tend to look at that more than I look the Western. — Brice Marden

From the ancient Chinese commentators found in the Giles edition. Of these four, Giles' 1910 edition is the most scholarly and presents the reader an incredible amount of information concerning Sun Tzu's text, much more than any other translation. The Giles' edition of the ART OF WAR, as stated above, was a scholarly work. Dr. Giles was a leading sinologue at the time and an assistant in the Department — Sun Tzu

Making a martial arts film in English to me is the same as John Wayne speaking Chinese in a western — Ang Lee

For the Chinese, the Greeks, the Mayans, or the Egyptians, nature was a living totality, a creative being. For this reason, art, according to Aristotle, is imitation; the poet imitates the creative gesture of nature. — Octavio Paz

Wushu is a move in Chinese, a physical move. An attack. Wushu is like an art. — Jet Li

Her life was like a burst of wild, flowing Chinese calligraphy, written under the influence of alcohol. — Zhou Weihui

Widespread state control over art and culture has left no room for freedom of expression in the country. For more than 60 years, anyone with a dissenting opinion has been suppressed. Chinese art is merely a product: it avoids any meaningful engagement. There is no larger context. Its only purpose is to charm viewers with its ambiguity. — Ai Weiwei

Surely you know the Thirty-Six Stratagems." I shook my head. "The ancient Chinese art of deception." "Oh, right. Sun Tzu. Jay Stoddard's favorite." "Forget Sun Tzu's Art of War. That's so commonplace." He held up a gnarled, age-spotted finger. "Far more interesting than Sun Tzu is Chu-ko Liang. Perhaps the most brilliant military strategist ever. One of his stratagems was to defeat your enemy from within. Infiltrate the enemy's camp in the guise of cooperation or surrender. Then, once you've discovered the source of his weakness, you strike." Somehow the setting - the visitors' room of the Altamont Correctional Facility - made my father's advice a little less authoritative. As I walked out of the visitors' room, I savored a feeling of relief. Because at that moment I knew that my brother was alive. — Joseph Finder

Jackie Chan is a very good comedy/martial arts star. He does one kind of martial arts that Jet Li doesn't know how to do and Jet Li does a martial art that Jackie Chan doesn't know how to do. You can both go to two Chinese restaurants, but both can have different kinds of food. — Jet Li

Ancient tradition always depicts a true Chinese musician as blind. Esoterically, this implies that his gift of the divine art is so completely guided by, and dedicated to, hosts of the celestial guardians, that both his sight and consciousness are focused above and beyond the objective world. — Corinne Heline

I don't think it's worth discussing new directions in the context of Chinese art - there were no old directions, either. Chinese art has never had any clear orientation. — Ai Weiwei

The Chinese art world does not exist. In a society that restricts individual freedoms and violates human rights, anything that calls itself creative or independent is a pretence. It is impossible for a totalitarian society to create anything with passion and imagination. — Ai Weiwei

I mean when you go to a network and say, "We want to make a martial arts series in the future." And give them the pitch. And by the way, the only way to achieve the authentic Hong Kong martial arts we need a full-time fight team unit working concurrently, and we're hiring a Chinese fight team from Hong Kong. And they were like, "Great, let's go." — Alfred Gough

Architecture is (in part) "the art of leaving out irrelevant details". Leaving out details, sadly, often derails into religiously ignoring details. The key word, however, is 'irrelevant': as the Chinese proverb says: people stumble over molehills, not over mountains. An architect consciously leaves out details that he or she has decided are irrelevant to the decisions to be made. — Gerben Wierda

When Nixon opened the door to China in the early 1970s, Chinese artists got their first view of the West. Suddenly five centuries of Western art lay before them as a stylistic smorgasbord. Chinese artists could reinterpret it out of admiration or try to replace it. They choose the former. — Arne Glimcher

I would like my work to be recognized as being in the classical tradition (Coptic, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese), as representing the Ideal in the mind. Classical art cannot possibly be eclectic. One must see the ideal in one's own mind. It is like a memory - an awareness -of perfection. — Agnes Martin

His wife had also studied art in her hometown, and she could paint, but depending on such work for her livelihood was just not possible. As far as appearances went, she was definitely a real beauty. When she was young, she looked a little like Gong Li, but now that she was middle-aged, she had put on weight and gradually taken on more of a bell-shaped look, resembling Li Siqin. But no matter what, a wife always looks better than her balding, broadbellied husband. — Chew Kok Chang

Shadows sometimes people don't see shadows. The Chinese of course never paint them in pictures, oriental art never deals with shadow. But I noticed these shadows and I knew it meant it was sunny. — David Hockney

In the early 1990s we witnessed the emergence of a revitalized contemporary Chinese art world that began as a reaction against the government-approved Social Realist style. Zhang Xiaogang, Huang Yong Ping, Ai WeiWei, Yue Minjun, and Wang Guangyi were among the first group of artists to establish a movement that became known as Cynical Realism. — Arne Glimcher

Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top; Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace. For the Cro-Magnons, space is a metaphysical arena of continually intermittent appearances and disappearances. — John Berger

Is all literature eavesdropping, and all art Chinese imitation? our life a custom, and our body borrowed, like a beggar's dinner, from a hundred charities? — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I taught a lot of art history, especially Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. But the painting classes came back. The nudes came back. Not so much the still lifes. So now our department is the worst department, partly because it has the worst facilities. — Ad Reinhardt

Some prescient American collectors, including Vicki and Kent Logan and Mera and Donald Rubell, began collecting Chinese art before 2000 with a genuine passion, but as the auction prices exploded everyone was beating a path to the galleries and artist studios in China. It became the 'China thing.' — Arne Glimcher

The verb 'to darn' is explained in my pocket dictionary as follows: 'To mend by imitating the texture of the stuff, with thread and needle.' But this definition does not correspond to the work accomplished by good Chinese housewives. When they mend a sock, they do not try 'to imitate the texture of the stuff'. Their art makes no attempt at concealment: it even takes a certain pride in revealing itself. — Daniele Vare

Chinese artists have been subversive over thousands of years, taking what they think of the government and embedding it in their art. There might be censorship of not going as far as they might. — Amy Tan

Art history is a global version of that old children's game Chinese whispers. — Grayson Perry