The Influence of Western Civilization and the Adjustment of Traditional Thinking

From the late Ming Dynasty onwards, Western missionaries brought with them the ideas and objects of Western civilization which began to have an impact on Chinese civilization. In the nineteenth century especially, under the influence of Western art, artisans and painters appeared in the coastal cities of Macao and Guangzhou in China, and the life and work of Western painters such as Chinnery in China gave birth to the emergence of export paintings, called “China trade paintings,” and Western-style paintings in Guangdong. Dianshi Studio Illustrated founded by Westerners in China, the art workshop “Tushanwan” established by missionaries to serve the mission and the church, the adaptation of traditional ideas by Chinese scholars, and the earliest painters to study art in the West were proof of the accelerated changes in China’s traditional civilization before the 1911 Revolution, and they are the reasons and direct background for changes in the concept of Chinese painting in the twentieth century.