A Study Of "Fish Swimming Amid Falling Flowers" By Liu Cai In Song Dynasty

"Fish" is one of the earliest and longest-lasting subjects in Chinese painting and has an important status and influence in the history of Chinese painting.In the Song dynasty,Xuanhe Painting formally divided the discipline of "arowana" into ten significant categories of painting,ahead of landscape,animals,and birds and flowers.With the rise in status of the "arowana" painting discipline,many famous fish painters and works emerged.As one of the leading fish painters of the Northern Song Dynasty,Liu Cai was a master and his works have since been described as ’divine,’ with the Falling Flowers and Swimming Fish,which has survived to this day,being the pinnacle of his work.The entire volume is arranged in such a way as to present a complete and orderly picture,and the arrangement behind it is a reflection of order.This paper takes the Falling Flowers and Swimming Fish as the object of study and investigates the stylistic form and connotations of it by using pictorial and stylistic methods.Firstly,the basic information about The Falling Flowers and Swimming Fish and the biography of Liu Cai are sorted out;secondly,the artistic features of The Falling Flowers and Swimming Fish are discussed,and the intention behind the panoramic composition is explored through stylistic methods,suggesting that there is a more profound connotation behind the author’s elaborate arrangement of it;finally,by combining the symbolic meanings of the multiple objects in the picture,the visual analysis suggests that the different parts of it contain expressions of ’ritual,’’righteousness,’ and ’benevolence’ and that the Falling Flowers and Swimming Fish ultimately points to what Mencius called ’the beauty of fullness.’...