The Five Oxen Alex Zheng 郑汉霄
Tang dynasty was a Chinese dynasty that succeeded the short-lived Sui dynasty (581–618), developed a successful form of government and administration on the Sui model, and stimulated a cultural and artistic flowering that amounted to a golden age. The Tang dynasty—like most—rose in duplicity and murder, and it subsided into a kind of anarchy. But at its apex, in the early 8th century, the splendour of its arts and its cultural milieu made it a model for the world. It was the start and the climax of the Silk Road which connected China to the rest of the world.
"Five Oxen" is a painting by Han Huang, a prime minister in the Tang Dynasty (618–907). The painting was lost during the occupation of Beijing by the Eight-Nation Alliance in 1900 and later recovered from a collector in Hong Kong during the early 1950s for $60,000. Now it is stored in the Palace Museum in Beijing.
The painting is 139.8 cm long and 20.8 cm wide. The five oxen in varied postures and colors in the painting are drawn with thick, heavy and earthy brushstrokes. They are endowed with subtle human characteristics, delivering the spirit of the willingness to bear the burden of hard labor without complaints.
Most of the paintings recovered from ancient China are of flowers, birds and human figures. This painting is the only one with oxen as its subject that are represented so vividly, making the painting one of the best animal paintings in China's art history. (http://www.china.org.cn/top10/2011-11/08/content_23854076_6.htm)
Five Oxen was the earliest surviving Chinese painting drawn on paper. Han Huang, from the Tang Dynasty, is known to draw folk scenes of farmers' lives. This painting is his one of his master works. It was the collection for lots of emperors in Chinese history.