ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to detail the cultural boundaries to explore whether a classical Chinese landscape painting can be usefully analysed using the S-F semiotic grammar, or whether the special preoccupation of Chinese painters, viewers and art theorists with the quality of the materials used. There are several aspects of Chinese painting and culture that do need to be considered, such as the competing claims of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism as underpinning philosophies for artists. Most art theory and critical practice over the centuries has focused on iconography, the literary or other representational content of a painting or sculpture. The teaching and study of perspective involved the relationship between the painting and its viewer as well as purely technical geometric mapping. The painting proffers a vision of a calm and peaceful nation. As so often under modern totalitarian regimes, painting is used as the only possible, though highly coded, form of opposition in troubled times.
