Gu Kaizhi is well-read and good at poetry and calligraphy, especially painting. Specializing in portraits, Buddha statues, animals, landscapes, etc. The world calls them the three musts: painting, writing and ignorance. Xie An is so deep that he thinks it has not existed since its birth. Gu Kaizhi, Cao Buxing, Lu Tanwei and Zhang Sengyou are also called "Four Masters in Six Dynasties". Gu Kaizhi's painting intention is to convey the spirit, and his ideas of "fantastic ideas" and "expressing the spirit with form" laid the foundation for the development of traditional painting in China.
Not long after Gu Kaizhi was born, his mother died. Gu Kaizhi because all the other children have mothers and she doesn't. He pestered his father and asked, "Why don't I have a mother?" His father said, "How come you don't have a mother?" . Gu Kaizhi asked, "What does my mother look like?" Father had to endure the idea and describe it to him.
Gu Kaizhi's works:
According to the records of the Tang and Song Dynasties, in addition to the portraits of some political celebrities, some Buddhist images were painted, which was part of the popular theme at that time. In addition, there are birds and beasts, which are related to paintings in the Han Dynasty. He also painted some images of immortals, because that was also a popular belief at that time. Most notably, he painted many portraits of famous people.
This changed the ethos of advocating ethics in Han Dynasty, and reflected the new method of observing characters and the new purpose of artistic expression, that is, to leave ethics and politics and attach importance to characters' speech, style and talent. This represents the expansion of the artistic vision of painting; Therefore, it puts forward new requirements for figure painting-expressing people's personality and spiritual characteristics.
In Gu Kaizhi's works and speeches, we can see that he repeatedly emphasized the description of people's expressions and mental states. Gu Kaizhi, Lu Tanwei and Zhang Sengyou were the three most important painters in the Northern and Southern Dynasties, representing the rapid development and maturity of figure painting in the Han Dynasty. In the Tang Dynasty, Zhang Huaiguan spoke highly of his paintings, saying, "Zhang Sengyou gets his flesh, Lu Tanwei gets his bones, and Gu Kaizhi gets his spirit."