Chinese connoisseurs of ancient art often add comments on the paintings they collect, known as postscripts. These postscripts supplement the painting by commenting on its style, improving its composition, introducing its context, and evaluating its historical value. As the ownership of the art changes, more and more postscripts without various purposes are added to the original painting. Since many connoisseurs who create the postscripts are influential rulers, accomplished painters, and renowned calligraphers, the value of the original painting consistently increases and the postscripts become an indispensable part of the artwork.
Night Revels of Han Xizai was painted by Gu Hongzhong in the 10th century B.C.E., during the Southern Tang dynasty…show more content… The only postscript was situated at the beginning of the scroll on the right side of the painting. It was a poem composed by Emperor Qianlong and written on the scroll by Liang Shizheng, a court official close to the Emperor. Qianlong praised the spectacle of the city of Kaifeng displayed on the painting. At the end of the poem, he lamented the misfortunes of the two emperors at that time. Again, Qianlong did not stop by commenting solely on the artistic value of the work; he tried to provide the historical context of the painting. Hence it is not surprising that the postscript, made presumably under the supervision of the Emperor himself, will lead the viewers in the future to the same direction of connoisseurship, although the whole work was intended for the enjoyment of the Emperor only. Due to its relatively small size and its marginal position, it is quite unlikely that the postscript will affect the experience of pictorial space greatly. However, the postscript does not always function in this way. A counter example may be Listening to the Wind in the Pines, a hanging scroll by Ma Lin in Southern Song dynasty. Without additional “commentary area”, the only postscript was written on the upper right corner. The calligraphic work was done by the Emperor Lizong of Southern Song dynasty during his art collaboration with the…show more content… Apart from the title of the work, it contained a poem describing the scenery the painting depicted and, possibly, the mental world it tried to express. Here, the postscript became a major component of the pictorial setting. Even though it took up only a small portion of the whole picture, it nevertheless filled in the only “empty” part of this picture. In the traditional one-corner setting of the Southern Song painting, the painting would “start” from a particular corner and then spread mainly into two perpendicular directions; in this case, the “axis” was the small child in the lower left corner. The introduction of the postscript here put an additional “axis” on the other side of the diagonal, thus creating a kind of symmetry in the overall arrangement of the painting. This brings its viewers a fresh experience of landscape painting: a symmetric layout in an actually asymmetric view. Last but not least, I would like to talk about the Shrimps by Qi Baishi. Completed in his early eighties, this painting was not on a hand scroll or a hanging scroll; rather, it was done on a plain paper. Hard as it was to inscribe words on the nearly fully occupied picture, he managed to write down his name and the year it was completed, based on his age, on the right of the