ARTIFACTS: Series on Asian art & history - A Brush with Wisdom

How did an Indian Buddhist shrine influence a Japanese pagoda? How are Italian pigs and cowry shells related to porcelain? Why did the ferocious warriors of Mongolia wear silk underwear? And how did wood block printing bring about a revolution in Japan and in European culture? These intriguing questions are investigated in Artifacts, a series that explores the origins and hidden connections among the art and artifacts of the great cultures and belief systems across Asia - on a journey through time and across continents from India to Thailand, China and Japan - to understand the impact of calligraphy, porcelain, architecture, metallurgy, wood block printing and silk on Asian history and on the history of the world in general.

A Brush with Wisdom
When Westerners first discovered Chinese paintings, they could not see their value. They wouldn't even acknowledge them as art. But, as Confucius noted, it is possible to look without seeing. If you learn to see beyond the surface of these paintings, you will discover their real beauty and find the deepest truths of the Chinese philosophies of life. Enter the hidden world of Chinese painting. What makes a Chinese painting so distinctive, so immediately recognizable as Chinese? Is it the subject matter that Chinese artists chose to paint? Is it the different tools and techniques that they used? Or is it how they saw what they were looking at? How do we begin to understand this unique painting tradition which has survived virtually unchanged for so many centuries? Well, in China, they say to understand painting you need to understand calligraphy - the art of writing Chinese characters with a brush.