Xie He

Xie He (flourished 6th century) was a Chinese figure painter and critic who is best remembered for collating or inventing the famous “Six Principles” (liufa) of Chinese painting.

The “Six Principles” introduce Xie’s Gu Huapin Lu (“Classified Record of Painters of Former Times”), which rates 27 painters in three classes of descending merit, each with three subdivisions. The “Six Principles” have inevitably acquired new and even different meanings through the ages, but generally they may be paraphrased as follows: creativity (or “spirit resonance”), structural use of the brush, proper representation of objects, specific coloration of those objects, good composition, and transmission of the old masters by copying them. These became the basic standards of both the Chinese painter’s training and the critic’s judgment.