Daan Pan's masterful and important study is an extremely rewarding read, even an eye-opening one, for all who are interested in traditional China's literati culture and the place of literati painting within it. Pan's excellent translations of numerous tihuashi (poems written on paintings), along with his incisive and nuanced commentary, show us that painting occupied a central role in literati culture, and was at times even instrumental in that culture's development. On the assumption that literati painting cannot be understood without attention to contemporary literary theory, Pan describes major stages in the history of both literati painting and poetics, and suggests stylistic developments in tihuashi themselves. After the fourteenth century, when many tihuashi began to physically occupy the surfaces of paintings, the calligraphic style in which they were inscribed could also inspire new developments in painting and poetry. The depth of insight that this book provides into the increasingly complex...
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