The Lyrical Resonance Between Chinese Poets and Painters: The Tra ...

The palace murals of the Han epitomize the style of art in general and painting in particular during that period, and Wang Yanshou's fu contains an accurate and vivid description of these murals. However, this description can hardly be considered a tihuashi text, as Wang's fu was written to describe the architecture of Lingguang Palace as a whole rather than focusing solely on the murals therein. The significance of Wang's fu lies in that it exemplifies the practice of writing about murals as well as the poetics of fu in his time. Wang's description of the palace murals may be considered a prototype of tihuashi in the sense that the form of fu partakes of both poetry and prose and that its pictorial tendency suggests the interartistic nature of this verbal genre.

Ironically, the rhetorical style of fu registers the influence of painting even though painting was a mere utilitarian craft at that time, deemed inferior to verbal art and valued mostly for its practical function in serving the court, religion, and education. Although painting was assigned an operative role similar to that of poetry, and though many skilled painters emerged from within the rank of scholar-officials and even from the imperial family, it was not treated as a liberal art in the mainstream culture of the Han period-and still less as a theme or subject matter in poetry. Zhang Yanyuan's Lidai minghua ji records a total of only twelve painters of the Western and Eastern Han dynasties.¹⁶ Most scholar-officials still maintained, wittingly or unwittingly, an aristocratic bias against painting or at least an attitude of condescension toward it. In his treatise Lun heng (Discussive weighing), the renowned scholar Wang Chong (27-ca. 97) claimed that seeing the ancient people of fame in paintings is not the same as perceiving their words and actions, given that people do not receive inspiration or advice by merely looking at pictures. In his view, paintings on walls are no match for the writings by the ancient wise people, which have been clearly preserved on (books made of) bamboo or silk.¹⁷

This utilitarian view of painting continued into the Six Dynasties period, when the hierarchical gap between poetry and painting prevented these two arts from aesthetic interaction and integration. In his Lidai minghua ji, Zhang Yanyuan quoted Cao Zhi (192-232) as saying that