Abstract
Qian Zhongshu's “Chinese Poetry and Chinese Painting” underwent continuous revision over more than half a century, during which its central arguments remained largely unchanged. However, the theoretical foundation on which it rests, namely, the division of Chinese painting into Northern and Southern Schools proposed by Dong Qichang in the late Ming dynasty, has been demonstrated to be untenable by the scholarship of Teng Gu, Tong Shuye, Qigong, and others. As a result, Qian's factual assessments appear unreliable, and his evaluative judgments become open to question. This article examines both the direct and indirect intellectual relationships between Qian Zhongshu, Teng Gu, and Tong Shuye, exploring Qian's conspicuous avoidance of and implicit response to the their theories, as well as Qigong's later, unnamed rebuttal. It argues that Qian's theory of painting, lacking sufficient grounding in practical experience, is fundamentally one-sided. In particular, it rests on the mistaken assumption that the complexity of brushwork is always positively correlated with the density of meaning. Moreover, the critical tradition he identifies is shown to be a generalization derived from partial and selective evidence.
Keywords
Chinese painting, Qian Zhongshu, Teng Gu, Tong Shuye, Qigong
First Page
12
Last Page
22
Recommended Citation
Jiang, Ruoshui. 2026. "The Blind Spot of a Great Polymath: Elucidating Qian Zhongshu's “Chinese Poetry and Chinese Painting”." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 46, (1): pp.12-22. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol46/iss1/2
