Pictures Worth a Thousand Words

In an article, Wu Longhan, a 13th-century poet, wrote that, "when someone finds a landscape too difficult to depict, they can complete it by adding a poem on the composition; when someone finds a poem too difficult to finish, they can write it on a painting to achieve the desired effect".

Literature and fine arts have been integrated with each other for quite a long time to add mutual glamour and depth, and to intensify their appeal to people from varying social backgrounds.

This is especially true with books, magazines and other reading materials that are decorated by vivid illustrations, which enhance comprehension and spark the imagination of readers as they flip through pages.

Illustrations for literary works constitute a part of the immense collection of the National Art Museum of China. The Beijing museum is showing over 300 such pictures from its archives at an ongoing exhibition titled Words and Drawings, running through Dec 24.

Artworks on show include ink paintings, prints, sketches and gouaches, which account for one-third of the illustrations in the museum's collection. Many of them have been prizewinners and shown at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts, which has been held every five years since 1949.

Wu Weishan, director of the National Art Museum of China, says a lot of people begin to get a sense of aesthetics and learn about art from illustrations.

"When I was a small child, I was attracted to the drawings in old books at home, and that was when I first felt an interest in fine arts," he recalls.

Wu Weishan says illustrations are a unique form of fine arts that have played an important role in forming people's aesthetic views for generations. He says although small in size, these works embody an admiration of beauty in nature, a pursuit of high morality and a call to pass on the excellent values and beliefs that have been preserved over the course of Chinese history.

The current exhibition shows that drawings are an integral part of the experience when people encounter literary classics for the first time.

Perhaps the foremost illustrations on display include those featured in Journey to the West, the 16th-century mythological novel written by Wu Cheng'en, Diary of a Madman in which Lu Xun, a leading modern literary figure, bitterly criticized the severe impact of feudal values on people, and Marriage of Xiao Erhei, a work produced in 1943 by noted novelist Zhao Shuli about a young couple fighting for the free right to marry.

The marriage of literature and illustrations is sometimes made possible by collaborations between great writers and artists. Fine examples of that at the exhibition are the drawings which Ding Cong, the famed illustrator, made for Four Generations Under One Roof (Si Shi Tong Tang), penned by Lao She the novelist and dramatist; the ones that Ye Qianyu, hailed "a master of sketches", tailor-made for Midnight (Ziye), a novel by Mao Dun; and those Huang Yongyu illustrated for Border Town (Biancheng), authored by his distant uncle Shen Congwen.

The exhibition also shows pictures that accompany folk tales, such as Ashima, a narrative poem of the Sani people of the Yi ethnic group in Yunnan province, modern poems and world literature, such as Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky and The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir.

Wu Weishan says visitors to the exhibition will find that those illustrations not only visualize the words and the meanings being implied, but also extend the vision of the reader to horizons farther and higher.

The exhibition has been listed as one of the selected collection shows at art museums this year. It is an annual appraisal event initiated by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism to boost the development of public museums nationwide since 2011.

Wu Weishan says the exhibition will not only rotate more of his museum's diverse collection, but is also a gesture to encourage people to read more, especially to engage in the slow and thoughtful reading of literary classics.

"Those pictures have reconstructed the scenes being narrated in the books. They provide us alternative ways to understand these historic masterpieces. They have made the words more vivid and our experiences of reading even more enriched," he says.