The Literati Paintings in the Yuan Dynasty

——A Study of the Metaphor

Abstract: “Implicitness” is one of the traditions of paintings in ancient China. Two reasons might be identified: one is the political situation in a specific historical period; and the other is the talent of the literati, many of whose expressions in the paintings are implicit rather than explicit. And in most cases, such “implicitness” results from both. It just conforms with the theory of metaphor in the icon, one of Peirce’s three signs. The Yuan Dynasty was the first unified dynasty ruled by a minority nationality in China’s history. The scholars who lived in the transition period from the Song Dynasty to the Yuan Dynasty experienced great changes both of the situation and of their state of mind; for various reasons, they often indirectly expressed their own ideas and feelings, therefore, the metaphor in the paintings of the literati in the Yuan Dynasty became highlighted. Based on Peirce’s theory of semiotics, this paper classifies the metaphor in Chinese ancient paintings into historical metaphor, Buddhist metaphor, political metaphor, and style metaphor, and expounds the metaphoric expressions of literati paintings in the Yuan Dynasty in the transition period in such aspects as the pain of national subjugation, national governance, unrecognized talent of the literati, and the reception of Buddhist ideas, and reach the conclusion that the scholars of the Yuan dynasty reflected of themselves and their life in unique ways.

Keywords: metaphor in paintings and calligraphy; semiotics; literati paintings in the Yuan Dynasty

Hanwei Wang: Nanjing Normal University, E-mail: hanwei1905@gmail.co 

*Corresponding author, Yongxiang Wang: Tianjin Foreign Studies University; Nanjing Normal University, E-mail: nshdyxwang@163.com