Year: 2017
Type: article
Abstract: What is the politics of inscription?' is a question posed over twenty years ago by W. J. T Mitchell, and the long history of text-image reciprocity in western picture making continues to be a rich area of research.1 This should by rights be a live question in the study of Chinese art too, especially as a particular relationship between text and image has often been seen as one of the distinctive characteristics of Chinese art.Many pre-modern works, among them some of the most famous images in the canon of Chinese painting, carry extensive colophons, inscribed there both by the artist at the time of creation and by subsequent owners and viewers .The 'established answer' as to why Chinese artists inscribed words on their paintings, one which points to the shared technical media of painting and calligraphy in the pre-modern era, and to the resulting conceptual link between these two practices, has more recently been challenged by Zhang Hongxing, who has unpacked the misconceived notion of this as 'some quintessential Chinese trait'. 2 He points out that while it is certainly the case that many early Chinese theorists of word and image shared the view of the ninthcentury writer Zhang Yanyuan (815-875) that, 'Writing and painting have different names but a common being', or would have
Source: Art History
Author: Craig Clunas
Language: English
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2620237462