A Study On Ancient Chinese Image Of Qu Yuan And His Works

Qu Yuan was known for his noble characters and fabulous poems,and he left many priceless treasures for the descendants.Because of his unique image and the abundant meaning in his works,he was repeatedly depicted and portrayed by generations of artists.Those Qu Yuan themed paintings all delivered artists’ respect to Qu Yuan and indicated artists’ grasp of Chu Ci.This dissertation mainly studies the images on the theme of Qu Yuan and his works,discovering the relations between images and pomes from seven different chapters.The first chapter focuses on Qu Yuan’s image in literature.Section one of this chapter analyses Qu Yuan’s image in his early years.This dissertation believes young Qu Yuan’s image resembles a perfect politician,tall and handsome,dignified and elegant,which perfectly combines the shared male characters of Chu Emperor with his distinctive personality.In this period,the extremely beautiful and elevated image Qu Yuan created in his poem is a symbol of his confidence in self-image,of his satisfaction with his early political career,and more of appreciation of his inner morals.The second section shifts to Qu Yuan’s late image.For instance,Fisherman is cited in this dissertation to prove that the miserable male image exaggerates Qu Yuan’s poor living standard and sullies his self-image.It is reality that changed Qu Yuan’s appearance and temperament,changing him from a proud rational politician to a frustrated sentimental poet.Late Qu Yuan was gentle and cultivated,aloof and arrogant,misanthropic but modest.The second chapter is about Qu Yuan’s image in painting works.Section one elaborates how Qu Yuan’s image developed through history.There are forty kinds of Qu Yuan paintings compiled in this dissertation,helping to explain that Chu Ci’s development leads to artists’ wider acceptance of Qu Yuan and stimulates producing.It could be said that the flourish of Qu Yuan’s images largely depends on Chu Ci’s development.The second part of this chapter analyses the emotions that Qu Yuan’s images aims to express.It is discovered that artists’ subjective emotions,social mores,and social changes all have a great impact on the creation of Qu Yuan’s paintings,and patriotism,independence and unrecognized talent are the three most important themes hidden in these works.In these artistic works,Qu Yuan was always portrayed with the monotonous figure and spirit,whose true image was paid little attention to.He was deemed by artists as a spiritual leader,a moral model,a cultural symbol,through which they can express their own emotions and create the unique Qu Yuan in their own mind.Therefore,Qu Yuan’s image in ancient paintings is originated from literature but somehow different from authentic literature.The third chapter explores the relation between the transmitting and receiving of Qu Yuan’s paintings.First,to analyze the media for Qu Yuan’s images to transmit.As the transmitting ability was limited in ancient times,Qu Yuan pircutres’ transmitting media could be understood as its carrier.Lithograph,silk paper and xylograph were what artists used to spread their works.Second,to analyze how Qu Yuan paintings are accepted.As people who viewed those art pieces had different life experience,artistic appreciation,aesthetic judgment,it decides that remarks by art and literacy circles,poem inscribed on paintings and imitative writings were the ways of receiving used most often through dynasties.Third,to analyze the audiences of Qu Yuan paintings.With the changes of painting forms and social trends,audiences of Qu Yuan paintings were correspondingly spread from emperors,aristocrats,scholar-bureaucrats to common people.The fourth chapter,setting Li Sao Picutre as an example,further studies the paintings in Li Sao.It first illustrates Xiao Yuncong’s Li Sao Painting,which was based on Complete Library in the Four Branches of Literature and Li Sao Painting published by the Commercial Press in 1935 and collected in Zhejiang library and thus was the most comprehensive painting books about Chu Ci.Li Sao Painting is valuable both academically and artistically and becomes the evidence for Qu Yuan’s works.The second section analyses Li SaoPaintings.This part believes that artists set Qu Yuan’s life experience as the theme of paintings and divide them into different parts by combining myths and legends,reality and fantasy.Artists also put their own thinking into the predecessors’ notes.Because of the limited ways of artistic expression,it is reasonable that paintings indicate some deviation from the suggested explanations in ancient books.In terms of features,what artists create is closely related with the text of Li Sao and highlights Qu Yuan’s melancholy and his ceaseless pursuit for beauty.The fifth chapter studies the paintings in NineSongs.The first section analyses the language features in NineSongs.This dissertation holds the idea that NineSongs contains abundant visual elements and vivid language image provides sources for artists to produce NineSongs paintings.The second section investigates the NineSongs paintings through history.In this part,76 sorts of ancient NineSongs paintings are compiled,delivering the idea that NineSongs was transmitted among only elites in the ancient society.The attitudes of adherents of the former dynasty is the decisive element that influenced artistic producing in Yuan and Qing Dynasty.Li Gonglin in Ming Dynasty is the one who gave birth to NineSongs Paintings,Zhang Wo passed it down,Chen Hongshou promoted it,and Xiao Yun refreshed it.The third section explains how paintings elaborate texts.Chu Ci texts have been proved to be closely related with their paintings.For instance,artists casts Mrs Xiang,Shao Siming,Shan Gui into noble,beautiful,tough females.The fourth section is about the poems on the NineSongs Paintings.By citing 44 poems,this part is trying to express that the soaring of national spirits led by time changing leads to the tide of writing poems on NineSongs Paintings in Yuan and Qing Dynasties.But there are differences among the poems in different times.Poems in Song Dynasty stressed melancholy,Yuan frame describing,Ming inherited the tradition of both Song and Yuan Dynasties,while Qing embodied self-consciousness.Artists read the poems when they were painting,and poets composed their poems when enjoying the paintings.But they all grasped the core of Qu Yuan spirit.The sixth chapter studies the paintings in Tian Wen.The first section briefly summarized Tian WenPaintings.By studying Tian Wen Paintings,scholars find it a mixture of words and paintings,giving artists inspiration when they are doing their own creation.Moreover,images in Tian Wen Paintings could be traced to ancient myths,religious and opera paintings.The second section analyses the three purposes of creating Tian Wen Paintings.The third section analyses how paintings demonstrate and comprehend texts.When paintings tried to deliver the texts’ ideas,most of them used either monotonous or comprehensive form of expression.When Qing Dynasty took power from Ming,the changing inner feelings of the citizens and the features of printmaking made Tian Wen Paintings notably political and unconventional in terms of showing texts.As artists dedicated to reproduce the texts,they gradually omitted the true meaning beneath the words.The fourth section analyses the artistic features of Tian Wen Paintings.Xiao Yun Cong’s works are extraordinary in its flexibility,humour and simplicity.The fifth section analyses Tian Wen Paintings value in both academic and artistic fields.Not only did Tian Wen Paintings bring new ideas to study Chu Ci and enlarged Chu Ci’s influence,but it demonstrated the charm artfully and skilledly through ample imagination.Tian Wen Paintings serves as a link between past and future and has a far-reaching influence on painting home and abroad.The seventh chapter studies other Qu Yuan paintings,including Jiu Zhang Paintings,Yuan You Paintings,Zhao Hun Paintings,Da Zhao Paintings,and Xiang Cao Paintings.Men Yingzhao painted Jiu Zhang Paintings to echo with the poems or to reflect Qu Yuan’s spirits.By depicting people’s facial changes and the whole painting,Men expressed his standpoints towards the era when Jiu Zhang was created.By analyzing Yuan You Paintings,it shows Men used five respective paintings to display the body part of poems.The travel line is the soul of Yuan You Paintings,so artists painted the five paintings according to Qu Yuan’s travel line,in the order of middle,east,west,south and north.The third section analyses Zhao Hun Paintings and Da Zhao Paintings.In these two art works,the exaggeration shown in Qu Yuan’s poems guided artists how to manifest their works,and these two sets of paintings could be divided into two parts,the dangerous society and the beautiful homeland.Hence they could be regarded as the paintings that respected Qu Yuan’s poems most.The fourth section analyses Xiang Cao Paintings.Although artists had a general understanding of the vanilla image in Qu Yuan’s poems,they never had a thorough research on it.They blindly repeated their predecessors’ statements and took vanilla as the symbol of emperors.In this way,whenever they were painting,they merely cared about the plant itself and copied sixteen kinds of vanillas from their appearance dedicatedly.