The impact of Chinese painting is quite different from that of Western painting. To my mind, traditional Chinese painting is like something viewed in the moonlight: quiet, meditative, two-dimensional. The Western tradition is like something viewed in the sunlight: bold, bright, three-dimensional. The measure, the essence, of Chinese painting is to be found in landscape; the essence of Western painting is to be found in the human figure, how things relate to people. For more than one thousand years much of Chinese painting has emphasized self-expression through the technique of brush and ink; prior to the last one hundred years, Western painting focused on the painting’s subject, not the technique.

~Li Huayi, from “The Monumental Landscapes of Li Huayi”