Ancient Chinese painting used the "Three Distances Method" instead of the scientific perspective method, which also affected the proportions of the images. Although the painters had a set of empirical rules about the size of objects, they also noticed that the size of objects decreased with distance: if a mountain is not as big as a tree, then a mountain is not big;If the wood is not as big as a person, the wood is not big.
Longitudinal 305cmHorizontal 5039cmCollection of Guangdong Provincial Museum
But the ancient Chinese were never interested in the physical proportions of nature. Historically, there were no natural proportions in ancient China until the Ming Dynasty, just as Europe used two different scales for figures and backgrounds until the 17th century.
LongitudinalcmHorizontalcmCollection of the Palace Museum
Fortunately, the ancient Chinese never faced one of the most acute problems of proportions, the proportions of figures in enclosed interior spaces. If the proportions of the figures are reduced compared to the building, they will appear very short and insignificant. Often, the background around the figure is either a garden or a landscape, if not empty. If the picture is in an indoor space, it is usually part of the window or door.
For example, in the Ming Dynasty's "Big Tree Wind Trumpet", Xiang Shengmo painted with physical proportions because the huge size of the tree embodies the essence of the author's thoughts. However, natural proportions always have to yield to image proportions.
LongitudinalcmHorizontalcmCollection of the Palace Museum
As we have already seen, the decisive factor of proportion is the nature of yin and yang in the subject-object relationship, and in the same way, the size of an object that varies according to distance never follows the laws of geometric perspective, but rather the needs of composition. The object in the foreground may need to be reduced to prevent it from blocking the back or being too conspicuous and thus gaining too much attention;Objects in the foreground that are too small to depict may be magnified to echo the mid-ground or foreground.
Although the principle of three depths gives the picture a great deal of freedom in terms of size and layout, these unnatural images hardly disturb our sense of proportion, because Chinese painting is always suggesting a larger space beyond the proportions it depicts. "The mountain wants to be high, but it is not high, and the smoke and haze lock its waist is high. The water is far away, and it is not far away, and it is far away when it is broken ......The water is not only far away, but also how different to draw earthworms!”
The same applies to another technique to show the grandeur of the landscape, which is the repetition of the parts: a large mountain in its own right, its size depends on the mastery of the technique of rubbing, and in a typical Northern Song Dynasty painting composition, the mountains repeat the theme like a fugue, constantly stacking upwards, and finally, this repetition creates an immeasurable majesty.
LongitudinalcmcmCollection of the National Palace Museum, Taipei
Here we are confronted with a psychological proportion, which is measured with our perceptions;In Egypt, the individual is insignificant, and the lack of proportions or proportions in the picture makes it oppressive;In Greece, proportions were created by man and could be measured;In China, the scale of all things is nature rather than humans, and nature is uniquely regarded as a symbol of the universe.
Thus, in China, the proportion of the psychological dimension is used to address the lack of a common scale in the natural world. In the horizontal composition, the closed and confined effect of the frame is no longer present, because such a delicate treatment is applied at the beginning of the composition:
The front of the stream, mountain and forest, twisted and twisted ......The edge is flat and far away, and the ridges overlap and hook together, and they go away.
In such a composition, the viewer begins with something finite and measurable, and is then taken into the infinite.