The Andrew L. Markus Memorial Lecture Andrew Lawrence Markus taught Japanese language and literature at the University of Washington from 1986 to the time of his death in 1995. Established through the generosity of family and friends, this annual lecture honors Professor Markus’s contributions to the study of Asian languages and literature.

The Appropriation of Tang in Later Chinese Painting

Ronald Egan is currently Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages Tuesday, May 8th, 2018, 6:30pm and Cultures at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. in Chinese lit- Kane Hall Room 225 erature from Harvard University. His research focuses on , Walker-Ames Room aesthetics, and cultural history of the Tang-Song period, as well as on text and image studies (poetry and paint- We know that the practice of inscribing poems on paintings was widespread ing) of the later imperial period. His in Chinese painting of the Ming and Qing dynasties. A special and often publications include books on the liter- overlooked instance of that practice was the inscription of poems from ary works and lives of Ouyang Xiu and Su , the latter entitled Word, Image, centuries earlier as part of the newly completed painting (poetry from the and Deed in the Life of . He has Tang period was the favorite choice). Such inscription holds particular also published a general study of Song interest for what it shows about the intersection of verbal and pictorial arts as dynasty aesthetic thought, entitled The Problem of Beauty: Aesthetic Thought and well as the aesthetic interplay of past and present. What sorts of effects were Pursuits in Northern Chi- the artists who inscribed ancient poems on their paintings trying to achieve? na. He is the translator of selected es- Although sometimes what they do seems merely gratuitous, other times their says in Qian Zhongshu’s Guanzui bian, act of adding an earlier poem to their work gives it new layers of meaning which appeared as Limited Views: Essays on Ideas and Letters by Qian Zhongshu. or aesthetic effect that the painted images alone could never convey. It may His most recent book is a study of the even alter the way we perceive the earlier poem, turning it in a new direction works and reception history of Li Qin- that the poet and earlier readers could not have imagined. The existence gzhao, entitled The Burden of Female today of digitalized databases of poetry allows us to identify ancient poems Talent: The Poet Li Qingzhao and Her History in China (Harvard Universi- that the painter may have deliberately left unidentified, and thus opens the ty Press, 2013; Chinese translation by possibility of new insight into this often arcane artistic practice. This talk Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing examines the many ways that ancient poems interact with the paintings House, 2017). He is a past president of the American Oriental Society. to which they were added in Ming-Qing times by the artists themselves.

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