Narrative in Chinese Art / Final paper Liu Chen and Ruan Zhao in the Tiantai Mountain Quincy Ngan (382051)

Introduction Liu Chen and Ruan Zhao in the Tiantai Mountain 劉晨阮肇天台山圖 (plate 1.1) pictorially narrates Liu and Ruan‟s experience of losing their ways and sojourning subsequently in a realm of the immortals in the Tiantai Mountain. The two protagonists, Liu and Ruan, appear in ten of the eleven scenes in the scroll, making it belongs to the genre of sequential narrative in the handscroll format.1 As explained by Julia Murray, sequential narrative refers to a kind of pictorial representation which represents successive events one after another on a common background in a linear series while individual episodes should be unambiguously, but not always, demarcated by inscriptions or landscape elements.2 Other than stylistic analysis, existing scholarships on this handscroll focus on the inscriptions which narrate the story and separate the eleven scenes in the scroll. Maxwell K. Hearn and Wen Fong transcribe and translate all the inscriptions and the three colophons on the scroll.3 They notify that the well-known story of Liu and Ruan should be recorded in numerous texts through ages; but they are not interested in finding out any particular textual record that serves as the base of the inscribed text. Instead, they apparently treat the inscriptions as original text composed by the author of the scroll, Zhao Cangyun 赵苍云 (active late 13th-early 14th century), and pair each inscription with an according scene painted on either left or right of the text.4 On the other hand, Richard Barnhart mentions briefly that the author of the handscroll “obviously shares a great deal with his contemporary playwrights, the authors of
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There are many examples of this kind, like the Liaoning Museum version of the Nymph of the Luo River, the illustrated scroll of the Bianwen in Bibliotheque Nationale Paris, the copy of Gu Hongzhong‟s Night Entertainment of Han Xizai, Qiao