Wosun A Noble Vegetable

Archives of Asian Art, 1995

This article proposes that two poems by the great Tang dynasty poet Du Fu (712-770)—Planting Stem Lettuce (Zhong woju) and Delivery of Vegetables from the Supervising Gardner (Yuan guan song cai)—were textual allusions behind paintings of long-stemmed leafy-green vegetables. When Du Fu compared the refined man君子to a long-stemmed vegetable 萵苣he created a new metaphor. The antithesis of 萵苣was weeds and thorns 野草与荆棘. The poems gave painters the potential to convey Confucian rectitude and a sense of moral outrage. A more innocent set of associations that developed around long-stemmed vegetables is also explored. Du Fu’s vegetable was painted by little-known Yuan dynasty artists, by famous painters such as the late Ming dynasty scholar-official Huang Daozhou, the Ming loyalist Yun Shouping, and the 20th century descendent of the Manchu imperial house Pu Xinyu.

Jiaqian Zhu, 2018

R O C Z N I K O R I E N T A L I S T Y C Z N Y, 2022

Precepts and taboos play a central role in the systematization of Daoist communities. On this set of rules hinges the development of various Daoist movements and the establishment of different Daoist schools. In this article, I investigate the proscriptions about the five pungent vegetables (wuxin 五辛 or wuhun 五葷, allium vegetables) consumption in Daoist early medieval prescription's texts. Whereas previous scholarship has analyzed the influence of Buddhism in Daoist monastic rules, this paper turns the attention to the way in which the five pungent vegetables taboo was elaborated in Daoist discourse, especially in texts from the early medieval era. It argues that in Daoist prescription's texts, the allium vegetables taboo is supported and justified by the aversive emotion of disgust. By describing the five pungent vegetables as polluted, defiled and even dangerous items, Daoist texts construct the perfect condition for their repulsion and the taboo's final systematization.

vbn.aau.dk

Television, Sex and Society: Analysing Contemporary Representations, eds. Basil Glynn, James Aston, and Beth Johnson, 2012

2010

The canonic Chinese theme Pictures of Agriculture and Sericulture 耕織圖 (Chinese: gengzhitu, Japanese: kōshokuzu) was transmitted to Japanese painting circles from the fifteenth- through the nineteenth- centuries. Paintings with agrarian motifs decorated the palaces of the Ashikaga shoguns and the abbot's quarters in the Daisen'in temple, and were reproduced many times by masters and disciples of the Kano school throughout the Edo period (1603-1868). From theeighteenth century on, agrarian vignettes also appeared in woodblock prints of various types:from the encyclopedic guidebook to the erotic color print.My dissertation focuses on this theme as a case study of painterly transmission. The first chapter compares the wall-paintings in the Daisen'in with earlier Chinese paintings, anddemonstrates that Japanese painters consciously altered the original figures in order to change their Confucian messages. Thus, I propose that the transmission of k!shokuzu exemplifies that pain...

Reading Fu Poetry: From the Han to Song Dynasties, 2022

This book chapter comes from the 2022 volume Reading Fu Poetry: From the Han to Song Dynasties, edited by Nicholas M. Williams. It focuses on the “Small Garden Rhapsody” (“Xiaoyuan fu” 小園賦) of Yu Xin 庾信 (513–581), a court literatus of the Liang and the Northern Zhou dynasties who was recognized as one of the most important poets in the sixth century. The rhapsody presents Yu’s life in reclusion through a description of residing in his small garden and voices a strand of sentiments and reflections about his past and present realities. Its seemingly simple and allusive but highly controlled language, adoption of distinct rhyming patterns, and construction of the image of a scholar-farmer familiar from earlier literature on reclusion embodies new strands of development of fu. This rhapsody of Yu Xin also stands out in its emotional richness and nuance, representing a significant strand of development of the fu in the Six Dynasties. Moreover, the piece itself has been regarded as an important component of Yu Xin’s authorial images as recluse and frustrated scholar at a critical moment of his life. My analysis of the rhapsody shows that behind the façade of the writer as a scholar-farmer who lives a reclusive style lies a string of complicated emotions that could only be understood with adequate knowledge about his life experience; I argue that it is exactly the way Yu Xin adopts a conventional literary topic to articulate his various sentiments that makes this piece of writing unique.