Emphasis was also placed on the spiritual qualities of the painting and on the ability of the artist to reveal the inner harmony of man and nature, as perceived according to Taoist and Buddhist concepts.
Tkangka is painted on cotton canvas or embroidered Buddhist banner which was hung in a monastery or a family altar and carried by lamas in ceremonial processions. Sino-Tibetan thangkas reveal the exchange and inflences of the Chinese style paintings and show the diverse ways of the buddhist faith over Himalaya mountains.
During the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368), painters joined the arts of painting, poetry, and calligraphy by inscribing poems on their paintings. These three arts worked together to express the artist’s feelings more completely than one art could do alone. The tradition of painting simple subjects—a branch with fruit, a few flowers, or one or two horses—developed.
Some painters of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) continued the tradition of the Yuan scholar-painters. Another group of painters, known as the Zhe scholl, revived and transformed the styles of the Song court. Narrative painting, with a wider color range and a much busier composition than Song paintings, was immensely popular during the Ming period.
Chinese commemorative portraits, commonly referred to as "ancestor paintings," came into vogue in the late-Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties. Most of the ancestor portraits depict members of the Qing imperial families and, military and civil elite who ruled China until the revolution of 1911.
Japanese painting :
the decorative naturalism of the Rimpa school is characterized by brilliant, pure colors and bleeding washes. The Kanō school is one of the most famous schools of Japanese painting. Kanō painters often worked on a large scale, painting nature scenes of birds, plants, water, or other animals on sliding doors or screens, covering the background with gold leaf.
With the Chinese influence, new art forms were adapted, such as Buddist works in Nara and landscape painting by literati in the Tokugawa era.
The presence of Portuguese in Japan is painted on the “Nanban screen”, the six panel screens depicting the arrival of a Portuguese ship is a particularly famous theme.
