Challenging the Pictorial Language of Literati Ink Painting

Abstract

At the heart of this paper is a simple question: why do Chinese artist write on paintings? The most common rationale is that painting and writing in China involved the same material processes – the same brush, ink, silk or paper, and this shared materiality shaped the natural development of their relationship. It is also held that Chinese writing is ideographic and therefore lends itself to a closer relationship with the pictorial. Both of these positions, and particularly the latter, suggest that the relationship between word and image is quintessentially "natural" and "self-evident" and it is this relationship that makes ink paintings "Chinese." This paper challenges this idea and suggests that the similarity of tools and medium did NOT make it easier for the two to sit together, because there was always a problem of how to read the image, or whether one should “read.” By examining the unspoken regulations of where one could write on a painting, this paper looks at some of the ways artists conformed and challenged the relationship between words and images.