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| Art Q&A > Painting |
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Brick and stone reliefs: Chinese paintings in 3-D The reliefs of Sichuan Province are rectangular in shape and some of their subjects were drawn vertically. Two such examples include the historical stories "Return the Jade Intact to the State of Zhao" and "Jingke Killing the Qin Emperor," both of which are about 2 meters long. Other reliefs in Sichuan at 11 meters in length portray vehicles, acrobatics, dance performances, farming and cooking scenes and historical stories. Compared to reliefs in other Chinese regions, the ones in Sichuan are simpler, livelier and more natural. In the Western Han Dynasty (206BC-AD24), the walls, gates, arches and tablets in rulers' tombs and the walls in their ancestral halls were all stone and brick. Here, the reliefs were painted red. But before the paint was applied, the stones were only slightly polished to retain a free and natural beauty.
Archaeologists in Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality unearthed more than 20 pieces of brick reliefs from a tomb of the Eastern Han Dynasty in January 2004. Lin Bizhong, a noted archaeologist from the Chongqing Municipal Archaeological Team, said that this was the first time bricks with molded designs had ever been unearthed in Chongqing. Such tomb bricks had only been excavated in Chongqing and are now under State protection. Lin acknowledged that since the brick-and-stone-structured tomb was robbed, the only valuable items that remained were the brick reliefs. Designs on the bricks include horse-drawn carriages accompanied by guards, the image of Fuxi (China's ancient sun god), and images of high-nosed and hollow-eyed people, who may have been from various Chinese ethnic groups or foreigners. According to experts, designs of horse-drawn carriages accompanied by guards indicate that the tomb owner was someone of high social status; bricks with the image of Fuxi are important materials for studying the religion and culture of the period; and the images of foreigners reflected cultural exchanges between the East and West in the Eastern Han Dynasty. Archaeologists also found traces of red hues on the
bricks, which, they say, may be traces of color painting.
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