A Study on the Depictions of Deities and the Accompanying Poems in Qian Xuan’s Nine Songs Paintings

Among the Chu Ci (Songs of Chu), the eleven hymns contained in the Jiu Ge (Nine Songs) and their divine protagonists have long served as popular subjects for Chinese painters. In recent years, research in China on Nine Songs Paintings (Jiu Ge Tu) has advanced considerably, with the dominant view asserting that the tradition of Li Gonglin’s (Song dynasty) ink-outline Nine Songs Paintings continued into the mid-Ming period. However, no detailed study has been found concerning the Nine Songs Paintings painted by Qian Xuan in the early Yuan dynasty.<br/> This article focuses on a version of Qian Xuan’s Nine Songs Paintings recently discovered by the author in the collection of the National Museum of Korea. Qian Xuan’s work consists of nine paintings arranged in the zuo wen you tu format (text on the left, painting on the right), paired with nine inscriptions in kaishu by the Yuan calligrapher Yu He. Unlike Li Gonglin’s ink-outline style, Qian Xuan’s Nine Songs Paintings is a polychrome painting, and the depictions of the deities reveal his distinctive visual interpretation of the Jiu Ge.<br/> The poems are mostly concise, around forty characters each, effectively capturing the central themes of the original Jiu Ge. They can be regarded as a kind of new Jiu Ge, which, in combination with Qian Xuan’s paintings, offers an intermedial aesthetic experience.