Breath, Motion and Time: Narrative Techniques in Representational Chinese Handscroll Painting

This article examines the problems of temporality in narrative theory within thespecific frame of Chinese pictorial narratives in handscroll format. This particularfocus on handscrolls and on the Chinese tradition of representational painting—as opposed to other media of production and other traditions of representationalart—is motivated by the privileged status of Chinese painting in art history, and theinvaluable insights offered by the handscroll format to the field of narrative theory.Chinese painting constitutes one of the two oldest traditions of representationalpainting in the world, along with the amply studied European tradition, andit significantly differs from the European tradition due to the value it places ondeixis; while one of the goals of the European representational tradition has been toperfect techniques that would erase all signs of the artist’s brushwork, so that a fullillusion of three-dimensional reality could be created on a two-dimensional surface,Chinese representational painting has placed great import on the preservation ofthe traces of the artist’s brushwork; so much so that an educated contemplation ofa representational Chinese painting invariably involves two subjects: the visibl subject, such as a landscape or a scene from daily life, and the subject of the artist’shand moving over the painting’s surface at the time of its creation. In paintingsrendered in the handscroll format, where viewers are allowed to experiencemovement both in space and in time, parallel to their own movements of rollingand unrolling the scroll, an array of problems concerning narrative time, memory,and learning through story-building could be addressed effectively. Thus, throughan overview of the six principles of Chinese painting, followed by an analysis ofthe variations in compositional method and the prevailing genres of handscrollpaintings, this article explores the intricacies of storytelling—through verbal orpictorial means alike—not as a one-way communication, but rather as a neuralnetwork where the meaning, that is, the experience of the story is continuously rebuiltthrough multi-directional interactions with the artists and their work.

Anahtar Kelimeler:

Chinese painting, handscroll, deixis, narrative theory

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