Visual Space And Image Reproduction In Screen Painting

In this essay I tries to illustrate what kind of role screen plays in Chinese traditional paintings through analysing its multiple natures, and explore the historical collection between these paintings. Screen is an object, a kind of painting material, an image, and it also could has these three natures at the same time. Because of the multiplicity of the screen, ancient Chinese artists could create their works boundlessly. The concept can help us to understand the intention of these artists and the method of painting when we analyse screen paintings, and explore historical collection between them.The authors of Playing Chess Before Double Screen and Collating Texts are Zhou Wenju and Wang Qihan, they both worked for the imperial of Southern Tang Dynasty. They took screen as an important visual image, but their intention were quite different. Playing Chess Before Double Screen is one of the most complex and most puzzling image in traditional Chinese paintings, the painter deliberately confused viewers, and tried to induced the viewer to believe interior image painted in the screen is part of the real world. In this picture the screen is the frame and also the boundaries of the space, it makes scattered space a complete image. In Wang Qihan’s work Collating Texts, the juxtaposition of literati and landscape screen intents to show the scholars’ inner mental world and external material world at the same time. By exploring the development of the landscape screen, we reveal the new symbolic significance: painting screen signified the spiritual world of the literati. But the symbolism gradually transformed in the Song Dynasty, an anonymous painter extracted, combined and modify the image of Playing Chess Before Double Screen and Collating Texts and create a hybrid picture, the viewer are confused by intricate image. The painter use the image of classic works and reflected contemporary phenomenon at the same time. But we found that these three works are the imitation of the original work. They created painting in the painting through modifying the image on the screen, so as to explain and represent the classic work.