Mineral pigments once held the dominant position in Chinese painting. Cliff paintings from the Neolithic Age in Cangyuan, Yunnan Province, and mineral-color paintings on the site of the imperial palace of the Qin Dynasty (221-207 B. C.) in Xianyang, Shaanxi Province, were done with natural mineral pigments by the ancestors of today's Chinese people, revealing their sentiments and their unsophisticated aesthetic consciousness. The mineral-color murals in the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang, Gansu Province, are world famous.
Later, the appearance of ink and wash forced mineral colors to take a back seat. Today, the rejuvenation of mineral-color painting has caught the attention of Chinese people in the fine arts.
Artists working in mineral colors use glue as the adhesive for the pigments. They sometimes paint directly on walls and sometimes on paper, silk, wooden boards, leather, and fabrics of hemp or cotton. Newly invented artificial mineral pigments improve the purity and brightness of the colors and enrich the expressivity of the paintings. Pigment granules of various sizes produce textures that ancient mineral-color paintings could not attain, and modern heating technology changes the colors of the traditional metallic foils and natural pigments used since ancient times, permitting new effects.
These advances have broadened the expressive range of modern Chinese painting. They have opened new paths and brought about changes in the use of colors and textures, adapting traditional mineral-color painting to modern aesthetics and breaking the domination of ink and wash.
The rejuvenation of mineral-color painting has evoked a wide response among young Chinese painters, and not long ago, an exhibition of Chinese mineral-color paintings was held in the China Gallery of Fine Arts in Beijing. Critics praised the exhibition for showing new paths in traditional Chinese painting and new varieties of expression.
(China Pictorial January 15, 2002)
