The Relationship between Words and Images Represented in The Goddess of the Lo River in the Liaoning Provincial Museum

Focusing on the relationship between words and images, this paper is an analytical reading of the Liaoning version of The Goddess of the Lo River (Luoshen fu tu), which illustrates the prose-poem by the same title by Cao Zhi (192-232). The prose-poem tells about a brief and sad love story between the poet and the Goddess, and is noted for its beautiful imagery and musical quality. The scroll, a mid-eleventh century copy of a late
sixth century original, skillfully translates the aesthetic quality of the prose-poem by various pictorial devices. In a continuous composition, the scroll represents the story in five movements: “The First Encounter,” “Love Promised,” “Change of Mind,”“Separation,” and “Returning Home.” Curves are the primary aesthetic principle, which dominates forms as well as figure groupings, aiming at creating rich rhythmic visual movements for the painting. The subtle verbal implications of the prose-poem are pictorially rendered by literal, metaphorical, suggestive and symbolic representational devices. The full text of the prose-poem is copied in many sections of varied length to link, as well as to separate, figures and landscape elements in different scenes and movements. Those script in sections describe their nearby figures’ movements and their inner feeling, and thus, create an intimate relationship between words and images of the painting, a special device which characterizes the Liaoning version of The Goddess of the Lo River.