An Analysis On Ancient Chinese Poems And Paintings In Theme Of Pounding The Silk

As a vital process of silk production in ancient China, pounding the silk has been a daily work of people’s, whatever social rank they are from, and in particular periods it has become a popular subject in poems and paintings. Poems from earlier Han Dynasty to Song Dynasty describe the scene of a woman preparing clothes in autumn for her husband who is defending the country’s frontier, which reflects the poets’ concern about the people. This thesis analyzes poems in theme of pounding the silk spanning from Han Dynasty to Tang Dynasty, in order to find out the main feature of this kind of poems, through inspections of six common images and two themes. The pounding poems reorganize the typical images of poems in theme of frontier soldiers and boudoir repining so as to represent a situation in people’s daily life telling a historical truth. And paintings also give this subject a novel reflection and profound inspection. For example, Zhang Xuan’s Court Ladies Preparing the Newly-woven Silk keeps a record of history. Poems and paintings focusing on pounding silk show many differences on their ways of expressing the theme as well as presenting the main characters, depending on Lessing’s theories about the relationship between poems and paintings. While both the poems and the paintings create a model figure of traditional Chinese women, which is featured as diligent, loyal and serene. And this model can be significant to modern society in the aspects of people’s concern towards history, women’s self-acknowledgment through modern time, and art’s enlightening influence on human mind.