Sculpture

• Siren: '"The human form was never a motif of paramount importance to them. Their greatest sculptures were not done as glorifications of individual beauty, of physical movement, or other motives based on material experience. Even when they introduced elements of form drawn from the objective world, their creations were not done in competition with the actual living organisms, but as projections from their own minds intended to express or evoke ideas of a more general or spiritual scope"'
• Siren: '"Their art was essentially conventional. The sculptors felt no ambition to break the traditional symbols or to display some kind of personal originality, but sought rather to enter into the accepted formulae as completely as possible, and to fill them with the greater significance which depends on the intimate connection between the single individual and the universal life. We know this type of art from some of the medieval sculpture of Europe, but it was carried further in China; the Chinese were quite free from the tendency towards anthropomorphic idealization so characteristic of European art, and they had a stronger feeling for the essential unity which underlies all the changing manifestations of material life."'
• Chinese sculptures


  Generally representative of religious motifs that are Buddhist in origin and not infrequently in human form
• Buddha and Bodhisattva ideas


  Expressed with many variations in the shape of figures placed in postures of symbolic significance, intended to convey different aspects of a spiritual consciousness which pervades the whole universe
• Buddha and Bodhisattva figures


  Not to be interpreted as individual beings in the ordinary sense of the word, nor as memory images or idealizations of actual persons who may have existed at some time or other, but as portrayals of consciousness or symbolic indications of the successive stages by which the human nature approaches the divine
• Large-scale sculpture has not survived well in China
• Monumental works that still stand

  • Rock face at the Longmen Caves, Fengxian temple
  • Figures of Shi Huangti's Terracotta Army