This old man donning red robe with cloudy white beard was Hua Cha, a noted scholar-official living in Ming-dynasty China in 16th century . Acting at one point as the head of a diplomatic mission to Korea, Hua became known to average modern-day Chinese thanks to a 1993 Hong Kong big-screen production, whose comical, tongue-in-cheek portrayal of him bears little resemble to the real man.

The painting itself, done by a descendant of Hua around two centuries later, is currently on view at the Suzhou Museum in the eastern Chinese city of Suzhou, during an exhibition focusing on Chinese portraiture from the Ming and Qing dynasties between the mid-14th and early 20th century.

“There’s nothing special about the painting until you look at it really closely,” says Yang Zewen, the exhibition's curator, pointing to the man’s exceptionally-long fingernails. “I have reason to believe that this is a highly realistic rendition – a powerful Qing-dynasty official who appeared in a black-and-white picture taken of him around the early 20th century was sporting similarly long nails.”

"Why Ming and Qing? Because in between those centuries, Chinese portraiture, steeped in the thoughts and aesthetics of Confucianism, underwent big changes, thanks in part to the introduction of Western paintings," Yang continues.

In 1582, Matteo Ricci, an Italian Jesuit priest, arrived in Macao, where he studied the Chinese language and customs. It eventually took him 13 years to arrive in Nanjing, about 200 kilometers from Suzhou, where he stayed for a couple more years before making his way further north to Beijing. There he was given an audience by Emperor Wanli of the Ming Dynasty in 1601.

Among the gifts he presented to the Chinese ruler were three oil portraits. The emperor was believed to have been astounded by how lifelike the images were. In the following two centuries, more Jesuit missionaries followed Ricci's footsteps, among whom were many painter-portraitists with an innate understanding of the power of art.

"Two artistic traditions intersected — one embraced by traditional Chinese portraitists; the other, by Western artists who had previously been trained, among other things, to carve a vivid image with light and shadow, " says Yang Zewen.

Light and shadow — prominent factors in Western painting including portraiture — had largely been ignored by ancient Chinese portraitists "for a deeper, philosophical reason", said Yang Danxia, an ancient Chinese painting expert from Beijing’s Palace Museum.

"For them, it was the perceived truth about an individual rather than physical likeness that mattered. So, instead of going after a heightened sense of existence and momentariness often conveyed by the employment of intense light and shadow, they went for something more constant, more indispensable of the man, as seen through their mind's eye," she says.

However, that doesn't mean that the Chinese portraitists who had contact with the missionaries and their art weren't tempted to reflect on their own way of painting. In fact, some of them did, including Ming Dynasty’s most celebrated portraitist Zeng Jing (1564-1647). Born 18 years before Ricci’s arrival in China, Zeng, who spent his most productive years in Nanjing, came up with what's known today as the mogu fa, or the technique of structuring with ink.

He first used light ink both to outline the subject's facial features and to shade certain areas of his face. This was before colored ink, sometimes of a rosy-beige or dusky tone, was applied on the face, one ultra thin layer after another. The goal was not to cover the black ink-shaded areas but to slightly subdue and soften them. Still visible under the translucent colored paint, these inky parts would add dimension to a face that would otherwise look much flatter, emphasizing details from the brow ridge and cheekbones to wrinkles and eye bags.

By doing so, Zeng had merged the two main methods in traditional Chinese portraiture, one using pure lines without any color or wash, the other, more popular in Nanjing and the surrounding regions, relied on the smooth application of colored ink for facial depiction.

To walk that fine line, Zeng had to adhere to a muted color palette, and had limited his experiments only to the faces of his subjects. The rest of the figure, clothing included, are rendered with highly suggestive lines.

Reflecting on Zeng’s phenomenal success, Yang Danxia from the Palace Museum says, "Toward the end of the Ming Dynasty, the Yangtze River Delta region, where Nanjing was located, experienced great prosperity, which in turn led to a general enthusiasm toward anything new. Zeng, with his latest adaptations, became the portraitist of his time. In fact, I’m tempted to call him the Camera of Ming China.”

In 1644, three years before Zeng's death, the Ming Dynasty met its own end, succeeded by Qing, which lasted for another 267 years. The dynastic transition did almost nothing to stop Western artists from coming to China, and Beijing in particular. In their attempt to please the Qing rulers, these artists, among them Italian Jesuit missionary painter Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766), had created royal portraits as if they had been painted in open light, which readily deleted all darkness.

Flanked by two portraits of his royal consorts — one of them the mother of his successor Emperor Qianlong, Yongzheng appears in the painting, done with traditional Chinese colored ink on silk, as a rather benign-looking character with a sense of aplomb. His facial features are delicately rendered, with light shading on the nasal wings and toward the back of his face.

While many Western portraitists indicated strongly at a single light source through the dramatic interplay between light and shadow, the missionary artists, in their attempt to reconcile two artistic traditions, had made their works appear as if they had been painted in open light, which readily deleted all darkness.

Interestingly, one Western ruler who also insisted that no shadow came across her face is Elizabeth I, the powerful, long-reigning Queen of England from the 16th century. Elizabeth oversaw the creation of many of her likenesses by artist Nicholas Hilliard that look a bit flat, a deliberate decision for the monarch who probably thought naturalistic representation was not entirely helpful in the projection of power and symbolism.

In 1729, Shi Xue, or The Science of Perspectives, a richly illustrated book and the first Chinese one to have dealt with the topic, was published. The author, Nian Xiyao, elder brother of Nian Gengyao, the right-hand man of Emperor Yongzheng before his deadly fall from grace, had studied perspective with Castiglione.

"It's a two-way street whereby the Chinese and Western artists came under the influences of each other," says Yang Zewen. "While some of the influences had led to conscious decisions — like the one to keep shadows off the face, others were felt more subtly, sometimes without one's knowledge."

In 1711, Italian Jesuit priest Matteo Ripa was appointed court painter by Emperor Kangxi. According to his own memoir, to get that position, Ripa was asked to prove his own worth, with painting tools drawn from both Chinese and Western traditions.

"These included a Chinese brush, some paint and an oil painting canvass," he wrote.

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