Introduction

This special issue of Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture is concerned primarily with the literature and visual culture of early modern China (1550–1911). Instead of addressing the relationship between word and image in abstract terms, it presents a few concrete case studies in order to examine the selected literary texts and visual images through their varied copresence and interactions with one another.

In pursuing an inquiry about this subject, we can hardly sidestep the problem of “modernity,” even if the actual term is not invoked. However, we do not proceed from the assumption that modernity is inherently associated with visuality or an image-dominant culture in breaking away from what is often deemed to be the text-based past. We dwell upon individual cases so as to capture the historical particularities of the literary and visual representations of the time while illuminating the dynamics of the meaning-making process in which both literary and visual media partake. And we aim to demonstrate how closely the literary texts and paintings (and other visual media and forms) of the early modern era engaged with one another through complex negotiations and interplays.

In her article on the production of birthday albums during the mid-Qing period (1450–1550), Lihong Liu offers a brief review of the existing discourse on the word-image relationship in China studies to chart the trajectory of the scholarly pursuits that have led to this special issue. In retrospect, the Song dynasty (960–1279) witnessed the rise of literati culture as a new breeding ground for literature and art (including calligraphy and painting), as the leading literati of the time began to stress the interpenetration and mutual evocation between poetry and painting as valorized venues for their self-cultivation and self-expression. This trend did not reach its zenith until the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), when the interdependence and commensurability of poetry and painting were reiterated so emphatically as to neglect their divergences in medium and technology. We find it unproductive to interpret literary text and paintings by locking them into an isolated one-to-one relationship with each other. And we strive to reveal what the images and words do under specific circumstances, and what this tells us about their operations at the visual and linguistic levels.

Yuan Xingpei takes up the subject of what he describes as “lyrical pictures”—paintings that represent the scenes portrayed in poetry—by examining a number of notable examples of the genre from the Ming dynasty in both water-and-ink paintings and woodblock prints. Apparently, no other type of painting better illustrates the convergence of the word and image, not least because “lyrical pictures” include in inscription the chosen poems or couplets whose visions they are meant to convey through visual media. However, time and again the painters of this genre seem to fall short of their declared goal, owing in part to their underestimating of the divergences between poems and paintings as two different media and artifacts. And their elaborate pictorial renditions of the poems often prove inadequate in capturing the elusive, sometimes vague lyrical vision or mental images, not to mention the rhetorical and metaphorical operations of the poetic language that find no equivalents in visual media.

However, not all painters of the time sought in vain to “convert” poetry into pictorial image. Yuan demonstrates how Du Jin 杜堇 (1465–1509) rose to the occasion by engaging texts and images on several levels simultaneously. In a handscroll painting, Du Jin copies selected poems of the past in running-style calligraphy, placing each of them next to a painted image while using the written texts to divide the pictorial space of the painting into several self-contained sections. One such section is “Taoyuan tu” 桃源圖 (Picture of the Peach Blossom Spring; see the image that graces the cover of this special issue), following a poem so entitled by Han Yu 韓愈 (768–824), in which he comments on a pictorial rendition of Tao Yuanming’s 陶淵明 (365–427) poem “The Peach Blossom Spring” and its prose preface. Not only does Du Jin include in his painting Han Yu’s poem in its entirety but he...