Qiu Ying (1494-1552) had little education, but his work is a part of the literati tradition.[Photo provided to China Daily]

Men of letters

And being men of letters, these literati painters had a natural impulse to express their feelings on paper, and would waste no opportunity to do so. One salient example is Emperor Huizong, whose own works seamlessly merged the arts of poetry, calligraphy and painting.

"The practice of inscribing a painting－writing down the painter's thoughts, often in the form of poetry, on a finished work's empty space－started during the Song Dynasty," says Zhang. "The fad quickly became standard practice. During the Qing Dynasty (1636-1912), there was almost no piece of literati painting that wasn't inscribed."

Mindful of the inscriptions that would later appear, in composing their works painters took full account of the calligraphy that would appear with the painting, an aesthetic consideration far broader than the question of where the calligraphy would be placed. One example is an ink painting of fish by the Qing Dynasty painter Li Fangying (1695-1756). The calligraphy on the right side of the painting effectively evokes the riverbank and indicates the water that was never painted.

Maxwell Hearn, chairman of the Department of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, says: "What is striking to me is that the educated elite of China has, since Song times, practiced painting and calligraphy as related forms of self-expression. Certainly this was only possible because of the universal competency in calligraphy, which was one of the distinguishing factors in what it meant to be an educated individual in China. In the West, good handwriting did not necessarily lead to a competency in drawing. ... Consequently, the practice of penmanship among literate individuals did not lead to a class of literati artists in the West.

"Instead, the creation of wall paintings or paintings in oil on canvas required the mastery of an entirely different set of skills and media. Furthermore, paintings were usually time-consuming undertakings that involved specialized materials. Consequently, painting became the purview of specialists－professionals－who worked on commission. Only in the last century has painting in the West been regarded as the pure expression of individual painters."