Recognizing the Impact of Daoism on Song Dynasty’s Landscape Painting

Daoism, as one of the major Chinese ideologies in Chinese history, devoted in finding the way to build harmony between society and nature. This paper investigates Daoism’s impact to Song Dynasty Landscape paintings. The paper is going to compare two representative Song Dynasty landscape paintings, and combining the Daoism’s classic Laozi and other documents to analyze Daoism’s ideology’s impact to Song Dynasty Landscape paintings and its painting skills. By determining the Taoism’s influence to the Song Dynasty’s landscape paintings, it can help us to understand the influence of religious culture and philosophical thought on artistic artifacts in ancient China, and in turn, to some extent, the influence of recent iterations of Chinese thought on art and even literature. As a result, we find that Daoism has significant and imperceptibly impact in forming the Song Landscape painting style, this could be seen as an example of determine the philosophical ideology impact to the art in ancient China, and might been used as an analogy to examplify the impact of religion and philosophical ideology to modern Chinese arts and literature.