Title

A Puzzle of Cultural Disguise: the Inscription of “The Portrait of Feng Jiang Fisher"

Author

Wen-fang Mao

Genre

Article  

Pages

465-521

Download

PDF

Language

Chinese

Key words

literature in the early Qing dynasty, inscription, cultural disguise, metaphor, fisher

Abstract

       In the Ming and Qing dynasty, there was a trend of making portraits to commemorate a person or an event. The inscription on the portrait is

esteemed as a concrete presentation of social interaction. In the early Qing dynasty, a portrait of Xie Bin named “The Portrait of Feng Jiang Fisher"

was one of the representative works. There were more than seventy inscriptions on this portrait and they were all written by famous writers in that

period. These literary inscriptions are abundant records of communication. “The Portrait of Feng Jiang Fisher" is like a puzzle of cultural disguise. The writers of inscriptions expressed various perspectives after observing the self-revelation and concealment of the portrait's owner, Xu Qiu. Besides conducting research into biographies and texts, the study tries to explain further the significance of this distinct case and related literary phenomena through the aspects of game playing, metaphor, interpersonal communication, and meta-writing in order to construct a new description of these literary activities in the early Qing dynasty.