On Paintings in the Southern Dynasties

Abstract: Paintings in the Southern Dynasties inherited traditions from the Eastern Jin Dynasty, represented by Gu Kaizhi and became artists’ ideal form to express their strong self-consciousness. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to reproduce the authentic paintings in the Southern Dynasties due to enduring wars and paper longevity. Thus, viewers can only have a glimpse on the original works by studying later-copied paintings, which brings a sense of estrangement. Owing to the uniqueness of their material and reserving places, the stonecarved painting in the second year of the Yuanjia period of the Liu Song Dynasty and Dunhuang version of Ruiying Painting keep authentic figures of the Southern Dynasties’ paintings, but these unearthed materials haven’t received enough attention from researchers who study the painting history of the Southern Dynasties. Based on these two works, this paper will further study the paintings in the Southern Dynasties through the study of iconographic and style features of the unearthed materials.

Keywords: the Stone-carved painting in the Second Year of the Yuanjia Period of the Liu Song Dynasty; Dunhuang version of Ruiying Painting; paintings in the Southern Dynasties

Hanwei Wang: School of Fine Arts, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China

*Corresponding author, Yanhua Xu: School of Foreign Languages & Cultures, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China