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

Summary/Abstract: 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.

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