Just what is a traditional Chinese painting? This is the question asked and answered in this magisterial work of imaginative scholarship and cultural insight.
Instead of offering an explicit definition, the author has approached his subject from two angles -- to see it as a physical, image-bearing object, and to see it as itself, a painted image.
Thus, painting is always an object of culture -- a handscroll, a hanging scroll, a fan, an album, a screen. At the same time, it is a pictorial representation. It transcends the physical object that bears it and links itself with other representations from different times and spaces, its meaning emerging from such associations.