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woolion 3 hours ago

There is a similar path with Chinese painting. The language of painting was refined over millennia, but the last 2 centuries caused an extremely rapid integration of Western influences. This article is interesting because language is like water to a fish, the invisible medium humans live through. Since art is more 'foreign' and 'superfluous', the change were more obvious and there was much more debate regarding this evolution than in linguistics.

I discussed with a painter in the artistic lineage of Shi Guoliang, and he told me he remembered how much that could be seen as "Western art painted with a Chinese brush". I think the criticism was more directed towards such painters than say the Lingnan school that explicitly sought to revitalize Chinese painting through foreign influences, because it's really in the foundations of the painting -- how perspective and light are tackled through the 'scientific' system rather than the elaborate symbolic system of classical painting.