The Poetic Structure of a Twelfth-Century Chinese Pictorial Dream Journey

Abstract

One of the most remarkable characteristics of late twelfth-century Chinese pictorial space is that it reads as a poem by virtue of both its ink-wash technique and its composition—either a unified panorama or successive separated views. This paper examines how space becomes the object of a poetic wandering into mythical places such as the Xiao Xiang and an illusionistic escape from the political turmoil of the time.