Collection: Asian Art

Asian art covers the painting, printmaking, and decorative traditions of China, Korea, Japan, and the wider Asian cultural sphere. Chinese painting is one of the oldest continuous artistic traditions in the world, with surviving works extending from the late Zhou dynasty through to the present. The tradition employs two principal techniques: gongbi, characterised by meticulous descriptive detail, and shuǐ-mò, the ink-wash painting associated with the literati tradition.

The Tang dynasty, from 618 to 907, established the first canonical phase, with Wu Daozi raising ink painting to the status of finished art rather than preparatory sketch. The Song dynasty, from 960 to 1279, is regarded as the great age of Chinese landscape painting, with the Northern Song masters producing monumental compositions of towering mountains and the Southern Song court at Hangzhou developing the lyrical small-format landscape. The Yuan dynasty Four Masters, Huang Gongwang, Wu Zhen, Ni Zan, and Wang Meng, codified the literati landscape that the Ming Wu School around Shen Zhou and Wen Zhengming would later inherit.

Korean Joseon painting flourished from 1392 to 1897 under a Confucian court culture, with the late eighteenth-century master Kim Hong-do producing the period's most enduring genre paintings of Korean daily life. The Persian miniature tradition reached its peak under the Timurid court at Herat, with the workshops of Bihzad, and under the Safavid court in sixteenth-century Tabriz. Mughal painting, in northern India between the late sixteenth and the early eighteenth century, synthesised Persian and indigenous Indian traditions. Ottoman miniature painting flourished at the imperial court in Istanbul from the late fifteenth century onward.

The principal media of Asian painting are ink and colour on silk or paper, mounted as handscroll, hanging scroll, or album leaf. The principal sub-movements include Chinese literati painting, Song dynasty painting, Ming and Qing painting, Korean Joseon painting, Persian miniatures, Mughal miniatures, Ottoman miniatures, and Nihonga.