Breath, Motion and Time: Narrative Techniques in Representational Chinese Handscroll Painting

This article examines the problems of temporality in narrative theory within the

specific frame of Chinese pictorial narratives in handscroll format. This particular

focus on handscrolls and on the Chinese tradition of representational painting—

as opposed to other media of production and other traditions of representational

art—is motivated by the privileged status of Chinese painting in art history, and the

invaluable insights offered by the handscroll format to the field of narrative theory.

Chinese painting constitutes one of the two oldest traditions of representational

painting in the world, along with the amply studied European tradition, and

it significantly differs from the European tradition due to the value it places on

deixis; while one of the goals of the European representational tradition has been to

perfect techniques that would erase all signs of the artist’s brushwork, so that a full

illusion of three-dimensional reality could be created on a two-dimensional surface,

Chinese representational painting has placed great import on the preservation of

the traces of the artist’s brushwork; so much so that an educated contemplation of

a representational Chinese painting invariably involves two subjects: the visibl subject, such as a landscape or a scene from daily life, and the subject of the artist’s

hand moving over the painting’s surface at the time of its creation. In paintings

rendered in the handscroll format, where viewers are allowed to experience

movement both in space and in time, parallel to their own movements of rolling

and unrolling the scroll, an array of problems concerning narrative time, memory,

and learning through story-building could be addressed effectively. Thus, through

an overview of the six principles of Chinese painting, followed by an analysis of

the variations in compositional method and the prevailing genres of handscroll

paintings, this article explores the intricacies of storytelling—through verbal or

pictorial means alike—not as a one-way communication, but rather as a neural

network where the meaning, that is, the experience of the story is continuously rebuilt

through multi-directional interactions with the artists and their work.