Traditional Chinese painting is an important part of the 5,000-year-old Chinese civilization. This art, with brushes, ink, silk and xuan paper as main tools, and lines and dots as structure, has profound tradition and unique ethnic style. In the 20th century Chinese painting was in the process from tradition to modernity, reflecting its complexity of assimilation and absorption of Western art and clashes and blending between Chinese and Western arts. This book focuses on the close relations between the art of painting and Chinese culture, and tells the stories behind masterpieces, artists and painting styles.

Traditional Chinese painting was fundamentally an abstract Model art form. Although there were no absolute abstractModel Chinese paintings in its original meaning， objects in a painting were not a direct copy of the nature world following the principle of perspective. It was rather a combination or harmony between the nature world and human emotion， a product of "heaven （nature） and human". The effect Chinese painters would like to illustrate in their paintings was not a visual effect of colors and patterns as their Western counterparts would like to achieve. The description of objects in their paintings was no means accurate and few concerned about such factors as colors， principle of perspective， anatomy， surface feel， and relative size. What they would like to achieve was a world in their mind of non materials. The nature world was not an object for them to make a true copy and it was rather elements for them to build their own world.

 (Cultural China Series)