1. The countries of East Asia have the best contribution to bring to the development of the arts. Learning the art concept of China, Japan and Korea will allow us to make our assignments and projects simpler through a variety of activities and will give us the benefit of strengthening our expertise and knowledge in the creation of the arts.
2. Chinese culture has had a strong influence on the arts and crafts of other East Asian countries such as Korea and Japan, while Japanese artists and craftsmen have also gained worldwide prominence in such varied disciplines as woodcuts, paper folding, ceramic sculpture, origami, ink-and-wash painting and wood carving.
3. Buddhism and, to a lesser degree, Shinto, Japan's early belief system, were influences on Japanese sculpture. Buddhism originated in Korea in the 6th century, contributing to the creation of worship sites and sculptures adhering to the Korean and Chinese prototypes.
The elements and patterns common to the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese cultures are vast, but two kinds of visual expression are particularly important: a close affinity to the clay-shaped vessel and calligraphic expression through the ink-plated brush. The vigorous, subtle and technically advanced expressions, ranging from Neolithic earthenware to Celadon and glazed enamelware, were both central to everyday life and valued by acquaintances who judged ceramics by a thorough code of appreciation.
The increasingly abstract types of pictographs presented a way of writing that was image-based; the brush-formed characters could be normative, but they also offered endless possibilities for personal speech by ink manipulation and idiosyncratic movements. While Korea and Japan later produced phonetic syllables, the visual language of the educated continued to be based on an ancestral Chinese form. The interpretations of sentences, expressions, or whole texts could be extended or nuanced by their visual depictions. Painting was born from calligraphy, and the previous knowledge of the brushed calligraphic line was implicit in the skill of painting. As a result, calligraphy was unrivaled as a core factor in the transmission of cultural values, whether as knowledge or as an esthetic expression.
