Alfreda Murck is an independent scholar living in Beijing.
In late eleventh-century China, a group of disaffected government
officials, their careers in disarray and their lives sometimes at
risk, found ways to express political dissent and personal
grievances through the use of literary allusions. Expressing
dissatisfaction could be dangerous, so these allusions had to be
oblique...Circulating among like-minded people, these coded
expressions of protest and discontent were relatively secure from
outsiders' scrutiny. They are even more difficult to access
today—or have been, I should say. This impressively researched,
deeply ruminated book opens the door to their meaning.
*College Art Association Reviews*
Focusing on one of the best-known themes in Chinese (and later,
Japanese) ink-painting, from one of the pivotal moments in the
formation of the painting-poetry relationship, this book delves
into a classic example of polities turning to the arts for
expression. And because the politicians of this dangerous time
coded their painted-poetry with such subtle indirectness, Dr.
Murck's inquiry unfolds like a good mystery undertaken by a master
sleuth. Every reader, whether Asian scholar or arm-chair detective,
will come away with a far deeper appreciation of the
painting-poetry-politics triad in Chinese history.
*Jerome Silbergeld, University of Washington and Princeton
University*
Freda Murck's richly detailed book teaches us how to crack the code
by which important Song scholar-artists expressed their anguished
laments and political protests through seemingly innocuous
landscape paintings. Explaining how secret messages were encoded in
poetic allusions and translated into visual imagery, she uncovers a
new and important dimension of Song literati painting. Through a
series of ease studies, she shows how painting gained new
expressive possibilities by adopting the functions, metaphors, and
conventions of poetry.
*Julia Murray, University of Wisconsin-Madison*
More than any other study, this brilliantly researched hook carries
the reader into the intellectual environment of scholars, painters,
and poets who created new forms of visual and verbal expression
during the Song dynasty.
*Robert E. Harrist, Jr., Columbia University*
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