Painting in Situ: Su Shi’s Mural Practices and Its Impact on Song Paintings

Abstract

Su Shi and his circle have long been credited as originators of the Chinese literati painting tradition and with the inception of distinct literati art practices, including painting on silk, paper, and walls. Literati mural painting, due to its fragility, exists only in Song accounts, colophons, and poems. Building on the pioneering research of Maggie Bickford, Susan Bush, and others, this paper synthesizes their interpretations, elucidates the distinctness of literati mural practices, and sheds new light on cross-medium connections in literati paintings. The paper opens by focusing on the concept, “transmediality,” to study the parallel developments between two art practices in different mediums and the appropriation of medium-specificity, which is built on Richard Barnhart’s, Martin Powers’, and Richard Vinograd’s various reflections on “citation” within Chinese art. Then the paper argues that the beginning of literati paintings in Su Shi’s time grew out of the mutual influence between mural paintings and other art mediums. It thus extends James Cahill’s analysis of “spontaneity” in Song mural paintings to a broader picture of Song literati painting. The paper also complicates Susan Bush’s and other scholars’ reflections on the social attributes of Song literati art and suggests that literati mural paintings became surrogates for other mediums in different social settings.