Traditional Chinese Painting: An Intermedial Play of Sister Arts Since the Eleventh Century

Abstract

Traditional Chinese painting is rarely a pure painting, but a composite artwork with the dynamic intermedial play among painting, poetry, seal, and calligraphy in one scroll/album. The practice of inscribing a poem in painting arguably can be dated back to the eleventh century, pioneered by Su Shi, a prolific poet/scholar/painter of Northern Song Dynasty. With a reference and challenge to a few western scholars’ theoretical frameworks of intermediality, this chapter explores the complex interaction of different media in the traditional Chinese painting.

On the one hand, there is strong collaboration among different agents. Very often, after a painter finishes his/her share of work, a poet who may be his/her friend, patron, customer or later collector, composes a tihuashi (comparable to an ekphrasis) for the painting, then a calligrapher writes the poem on the painting, and the artwork is not completed until seal(s) stamped on it. Sometimes, the painter, the poet, the calligrapher, and the seal engraver are identical of one versatile talent; in this case, the intermedial collaboration is most integrated.

Nevertheless, when they are different operators, there is subtle resonance and rivalry among them: the painter dominates the scroll, sparing limited space for other actors, while the poet intends to go further through the verbal depiction of what is visual and the nuance of what is not visual, the calligrapher competes with the ink brush, the same medium as the painter’s, and the seal engraver strives to be impressive with a strikingly red pattern on the ink scroll, all of which provide clues what roles the different media play in the performance and participation of the art.