The Chinese artist with the brush, is just like the music instrument
with a guitar player or the piano player.
So the brush is my instrument.
In Chinese brush painting, the artist may not necessarily
depict the real world, but would be more or less like
to painting the landscape in their own mind
or even in their own heart.
Today we are in the right middle of Edinburgh city centre.
Here we have fantastic views of Edinburgh Old Town and also Arthur’s Seat.
My name is Chi Zhang.
I'm a Chinese brush painting and a calligraphy artist.
I moved to Scotland in 2005
as an international student and after I finished my studies,
I love this country and I want to stay here for 70 years from now.
I'm trying to work really fast at the initial
sketching process and I try to grab the most important things.
In Chinese brush painting, we have no single light source.
You can see it’s always in the miserable and cloudy day,
rather than have direct sunshine.
So yeah, in another way, today will be perfect
for us to make our Chinese style painting.
I'm starting to set up the desk for the paintings.
Traditionally, a Chinese brush painting
would be painting the mountains and the landscape in China.
But once I moved to Scotland, I want more people to understand
and appreciate this kind of unique, traditional art form.
So I decided to paint the landscape around us,
and that would be the Scottish landscape.
So I have paper here, ready. I have the paperweight, and
I’m going to be using this to produce some ink.
So it's a traditional way for producing ink,
with ink stick and ink stone. Using a clean brush,
to add a few drops of clean water.
You hold the ink stick in an upright position,
and start to move in a circular motion.
So the clear water turns into black ink.
Now I'm going to choose a brush.
It’s able to bounce back once you push the brush,
it will be good for painting fine details.
So you usually we take the brush relevantly dry
with the tip, only dip a little bit of water
and dip a little bit of black ink.
Usually the first stroke to start with always makes me nervous.
I need to think about the overall layout.
To talk about the Chinese brush painting we have to talk
about another important art form in China.
That's Chinese calligraphy, which is using a Chinese brush
to writing Chinese characters.
They are quite similar.
In Chinese language,
we're talking about the calligrapher and the painter as “shūfă”, which is one word.
So for Chinese landscape painting, usually we outline using
this variety of calligraphy-like brush stroke outline.
So I'm using this dot technique
to paint the bushes and trees, along the side,
in different shade.
That’s for the foreground,
because there are so many buildings for the foreground.
We try to- I’m trying to emphasise the mountains,
so using this mist and cloud.
Most of the time, we're using black ink to paint on white paper.
By the time we're creating the black space, we're creating the white space as well.
So the two parts have to be harmoniously related to each other.
There's no single vanishing point in Chinese
brush painting, and there's no shadow as well.
We do not use a single way of perspective either.
And it's more like stage art,
we see different layers.
In Chinese landscape painting,
sometimes you do see figures into the painting,
but the figures are always very small
compared with the huge mountain and rocks, which suggests that
human beings are insignificant compared with the natural world.
Sometimes we have to understand where to stop.
If you paint too much it will be over-painted, it will be ruined, this picture.
So think it's time to finish. Now I’m going to add my seal.
So that's my personal seal.
It has my name carved onto it.
It’s a nice feeling for me to bring kind of my own style,
my own tradition, and my own background, to the Scottish art world.
I think people from different background,
from different cultural background, we do need to understand each other
and try to reach this kind of mutual understanding
by myself is through art.