The "Romance Of The Western Chamber" Image Evolution Research

Since the birth of the "Romance of the Western Chamber", generations of artists have accepted and re-created the original, making its images rather colorful. The "Romance of the Western Chamber" has appeared in the illustrations, opera, folk art and contemporary drama, film and television adaptation etc, formatting the corresponding "Romance of the Western Chamber" image data’s. These images not only make the "Romance of the Western Chamber" from a pure scholar desk text to the visual culture times, make the acceptance group from the intellectuals to the ordinary people, but also help it from an elite culture to the mass culture.The author tries to use the historical and developing vision, and place these images in the history of the big background, from the print age illustrations to the new media context "Romance of the Western Chamber" stage, film, comics as the main objects in order to find the historical trail and its graphic relations.Through the historical description and the systematic evolution of text and images of the "Romance of the Western Chamber", the author try to reflect the image characteristics and acceptant situations in different times, and analyze the social, economic and cultural background of "Romance of the Western Chamber"At the same time, by the probing of the relationship between literary text and images of the "Romance of the Western Chamber" in different period,the author thinks from the Ming and Qing Dynasties to the contemporary era, the "Romance of the Western Chamber" images differ due to different media:in the age of printing, images Imitate and represent the texts, showing the characteristics of image leading the mainstream; in the new media era, images have the independent rights to speak, but closely coordinate texts to make the complete the "Romance of the Western Chamber"。So the author believes image-text relationship mix together in disguised form, not the "war" said by other scholars. Through the "Romance of the Western Chamber" this typical case, the author wants to provide benefits of the present investigation of the relationship between language and picture.