| Chapter : | Introduction |
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painting preserves what serves as models and warnings.18 Zhang also quoted Lu Ji (261-303) as saying,
Xie He (ca. 459-532) began his treatise Guhuapin lu (A record of the classifications of ancient painters) with the statement, “There are no paintings which do not indicate admonitions or document vicissitudes. The silent history of a thousand years can be viewed by unfolding paintings.”20 All these views cited here are derived from Confucius, who valued painting for its role in moral edification. During his visit to the imperial state hall (mingtang) of the Eastern Zhou kingdom, Confucius viewed the wall portraits of ancient sage kings and tyrants and said those pictures were warnings about the rise and fall of kingdoms.21
In his anecdotal fiction Shishuo xinyu (A New Account of Tales of the World) about famous historical figures of aristocracy and scholar-officialdom, Liu Yiqing (403-444) placed anecdotes about painting in the category of qiaoyi (literally, handicrafts), along with those about architecture and chess.22 Liu's book is typical of the discourses of the polite culture in his time, and the way it defines painting reflects a prevailing bias against this art among scholar-officials. The same bias even lingered on into the Qing period (1644-1911), when Yu Yan (fl. 1724)-in compiling the Yongwushi xuan (Selected poems about material objects or things), which contains twenty-eight categories of poems-put tihuashi in the category of qiaoyi along with the poems about chess, ball games, boating, and puppet shows.23 Interestingly, one of the anecdotes in the Shishuo xinyu relates an encounter between the scholar-painter Dai Andao (ca. 325-396) and his mentor Fan Xuan. At Fan's admonition that painting was useless and, therefore, one should not think too much about it, Dai painted a picture about a piece of rhymed prose entitled “Fu on Nandu [i.e., the city of Nanyang in Henan Province]” by Zhang