Ice and Snow Landscape Painting

Originated from Heilongjiang Province, “Ice and Snow Landscape Painting” is a distinct school of painting pioneered by Yu Zhixue, the native painter as the fruit of his 40 years of study, who has developed a style of his own in the art history of China. In his painting, the ice and snow are not characterized by the traditional techniques of dripping ink spots on the canvas, neither by simply leaving the space unpainted, nor by sketching out the shapes, but by drawing directly out by using thick dark ink with the mixture of alum water and white glue as readjustment，reproducing shapes and the essence of the ice and snow.

The application of white light, transparent body and the romantic charm of glitter and translucence have further advanced the technique of Traditional Chinese Painting, filling in a gap in the development of Traditional Chinese Painting. Numerous snowscape paintings of all ages to mention as there have been since they made their first appearance in Wei Kingdom, Jin Dynasty and Southern and Northern Dynasties; yet, they were all paintings depicting snowscape in areas south of the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, or in the Central Plains, or in areas within the Great Wall. Thus, snow-covered rivers, snow ground, snow-capped mountains and snow villages are commonly seen as their subjects but never have there any painters who are able to represent ice-covered mountains, snowfields, snow deserts and the moon in the snowscape, not to mention the immense expanses of forest knee-deep in snow, and glittering and translucent ice-crystal and soft rime. In other words, these snowscape paintings by predecessors emphasize towering mountains and high ridges but fail to depict magnificence and vastness.

Likewise, they represent chilly coldness but lack Siberian frigidity. They are sufficient in snow-covered landscape without any change made to the shapes of forest and woods, hills and gullies but deficient in the snow-white and pure-looking crystal-clearness, and the dynamic and the change of the snow whirling, dancing and rushing in the violent winds, accumulating randomly into unbounded stretches of wilderness. Mr. Yu Zhixue has an increasingly number of followers ever since he evolved his own technique of “Ice and Snow Landscape Painting”, among whom there are famous Heilongjiang painters such as Jiang Anli, Li Guangbin, Zhou Mo, and Zhao Chunqiou, to name just a few.