Artist’s Poems for Paintings

By Xu Liying

An important part of Chinese poetry is those inscribed on paintings as postscripts. This part alone can be a multiple-volume collection and an encyclopedia is needed to describe its styles, themes, developments, achievements, and representative masters. Of the 1,474 poems by Xu Wei (1521-1593), a Ming poet, over 300 were written on paintings. Xu Wei is a milestone painter of the ebullient impressionist style in the history of Chinese art. His poetic inscriptions are good poems in their own rights. Moreover, they also serve as visual components of the paintings.

For Xu Wei, poetry expressed his aspirations, ambitions, and impressions, passions, inspirations, and compassions. He was a genius. He began to study poetry at six and to write essays at 9. His life was one of unusual tribulations. His poetry on paintings is very colorful.

An artist great at painting and writing poems, Xu knew what should appear in painting and what should appear in a poetic postscript. The two parts come naturally together in artistic harmony in his paintings. His handwritings on paintings poetize painted images and his paintings add touches to poems. Take a poem he wrote on a painting of bamboo in black ink for example. What appear in the painting are bamboo shafts and twigs stretching into the sky. The bamboos look magnificent, a metaphor that describes a traditional Chinese scholars moral integrity. What stands out in the accompanying poem is partly about a thunder in the past that once struck with its overwhelming might but failed to bring the bamboos under its power. Another painting portrays bamboos whereas the accompanying inscription describes a rainstorm. The two also come together wonderfully.

Xu Wei ran into many troubles and suffered great pain and despair in his lifetime. So it is easy to understand why most of his painting poems are about his thwarted career and failure to get appreciated. In a postscript to a painting of grapes, he writes that though the grapes can be compared to pearls that stand for his writings, they are discarded in the wilderness as indicated in the painting.

His flowers by no means portray serenity, elegance and silent beauty. In a poem to a painting of bamboos after a snow, he condemns those who kill all the birds and leaves a bamboo grove empty after a snowfall. In another poem to a painting of bamboos bent down under the weight of snow, he asks why bamboos and plum blossoms must be destroyed and why the stream in the valley even does not get a leave left. The poems were written after a high-ranking official who once appreciated him and appointed him to a post was framed and executed. Yet in another poem, Xu comments that the world hates everything that reaches toward the sky and that thats why the plum blossoms are brought down toward the ground.

In another poem he compares himself to chrysanthemums in the wilderness that can stand the frost of the coldest autumn days and nights.

And many of Xus poems abound with fun of life. He wrote nearly 30 poems about flying a kite. In one poem to a painting portraying a cowboy riding on the back of a buffalo and playing the flute most serenely, the poet imagines himself as the cowboy and wonders if it is the right time to steal moms coil of thread so that he can go flying a kite the next day. □