The Representation of the Pattern Model of Wang Wei’s “Banana Trees in Snow雪中芭蕉” in the Visual Art of the Middle and Late Ming China: The Innovation of Shen Zhou and Xu Wei
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Speaker: Ms YANG Chin-Chi楊晉綺(SOAS): 632586@soas.ac.uk
This research employs the scene of “Banana Trees in Snow” as an example to study the correlation among historical documents, poems and visual artworks. The image of “Banana Trees in Snow” (雪中芭蕉) was a scene in the painting “Yuanan Lying in Snow袁安臥雪圖” that was allegedly created by Wang Wei (701-761), a famous poet as well as painter in the Tang China. Because this painting had been lost due to some unknown reasons after the collapse of the Northern Song, the sense of images, such as figures, banana trees and snow, in that painting was firstly documented in Shen Gua’s (1031-1095) narrative, Mengxi Bitan 《夢溪筆談》 (Casual Writing from the Garden of the Stream of Dreams), which caused great disputes over the meaning of painting among traditional Chinese literati since the Southern Song period. Therefore, Yuan and later painters went back to the original narrative of “Yuanan Lying in Snow袁安臥雪” in the historic material Runan Xianxian Chuan《汝南先賢傳》(The biography of former virtued persons in Runan county) of Jin period to repicture this topic. Shen Zhou (1427-1509), a Ming painter, started to extract the image of “Banana trees” alone from the pattern model of ancient painting and put them as an solitary sketch topic, as well as wrote many poems and several articles of painting regarding this topic. Following the pioneer experiments of Shen Zhou, a well-known painter of the late Ming China, Xu Wei (1521-1593), paid significant attention to the reproduction of this brand-new topic in poems and paintings together with the sense of “Banana Trees in Snow” in Wang Wei’s painting. It is concluded that the painters of the Yuan and Ming dynasty mainly followed the narrative of historical documents to represent their ideas of “Yuanan Lying in Snow” without depicting “banana trees” in their paintings rather than traced the sense of Wan Wei’s painting that was described in the Mengxi Bitan; Shen Zhou and Xu Wei used “banana trees” as an independent subject to express their reclusive idea as well as the incarnation of self-imaging.
Key Words: Visual art, Chinese painting, Banana trees in snow, Wang Wei, Shen Zhou, Xu Wei