Zhang, Anzhi. A History of Chinese Painting. Beijing, China: Foreign Languages Press, 1992.
This translation of a Chinese work gives us a glimpse of the iconicity of China's first "great" painter, Gu Kaizhi in the preface, where Gu's famous saying "form is merely a means to bring about spirit" is quoted as part of a larger elaboration of the "national characteristic" of "a Chinese painter." Among other general assertions of the art, Gu is presumed to have laid the groundwork for locating the "personality" of the human image in art in the "spirit," and not the "likeness" of the portrait. Vague though these terms may be, they at least admit that Gu Kaizhi was a theorist who imagined portraiture as a craft adhering to certain rules and patterns of painting technique. Lines, dots, color, ink wash...these are tools of expression that were first applied to the portrayal of human beings thousands of years ago, but only in the centuries after the Han dynasty, when Buddhism had entered China, and a new emphasis on the subjective, human feelings had been introduced into the nature, that Gu Kaizhi's theory of the portrait and the painting more generally occurred. It is also the very same time that Tao Qian lived, and developed another method for producing a self-portrait, using the prose and poetic language of his time. What a pity that on the one hand, Tao Qian did not produce an essay outlining his autobiographical project as Gu did the project of the portrait. Also a pity: that neither Gu nor any other Six Dynasties painter seems to have thought to paint hermits -- unless they did do so and the knowledge has not come down to me (yet).
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