Micbelangelo’s Last Judgement is one of the most extraordinary works of art ever made. Although its essence is Cbristian, its imagery has spoken across cultures for centuries.Beijing-based photographer and digital artist Miao Xiaochun gives us a fresh modern reading of the work so that we are aware of the terrible cost of modernization and rampant urbanization on China’s natural and cultural landscape.
In China, from the song dynasty（690-1279AD）onwards. scholar-officials turned to painting as a means of self expression. The mastery of the brush was an essential qualification of high officials and those artists who were proficient in the arts of painting, poetry,and calligraphy were said to possess the “there perfections.”poetic inscriptions on the paintings produced by these artist-scholars gave rise to a new genre known as literati painting . The literati tradition endured well into the 18th century until encroaching orthodoxy led to its gradual decline.
One enduring tradition in Chinese painting has been the use of stylized devices to represent certain types of natural object. In the 17th century, the practice of codifying stylistic differences was collected in the manual called the Chieh Tzu Yuan Hua Chuan (Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting).This pattern book has since been used by generations of artists to assist them in depicting trees, rocks, flowers, leaves, and the like. In the Book of Jên-Wu it is noted “ in landscape paintings, in addition to scenery. there should be figures（jên）and other living things (wu).They should be drawn well and with style, though not in too great detail. And they should, of course, fit the particular