Looking at the history of painting, we know that there are ink books listed in the tomb murals in the Han Dynasty and the cave murals in the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties. The woodcut lacquer paintings unearthed from Sima Jinlong's tomb in Datong, Northern Wei Dynasty, have a long inscription; In Gu Kaizhi's Illustrated History of Women in the Eastern Jin Dynasty, a long article of praise was also inscribed. The above headings are only picture descriptions. In the Tang and Song Dynasties, painting began to take the form of hidden topics. In the Qing Dynasty, Du Qian said in the Song Hu Tu: "For example, in the Tang Dynasty, only small print was hidden in Shi Gen and Shizu. About those who don't work hard often fall on the back of the paper. By the beginning of the Song Dynasty, one year after another, that is, one line was faithful, and two walkers had no books. " Simple paintings in this period are not an organic part of painting, but are dispensable. Until the rise of literati painting, the form and content of inscriptions not only changed, but also became an important part of painting. This is because the artistic expression has undergone a qualitative change and the aesthetic ideal has become interesting. Chinese painting has experienced thousands of years of development, from ancient symbolic murals to realistic classical works in Tang and Song Dynasties, and then to literati paintings with heavy charm in Song and Yuan Dynasties. In this long course, "a beautiful concept was pursued from the beginning, then reached and finally surpassed." (Hegel's Aesthetics, Volume I) It is precisely because of the changes in aesthetics. Later literati paintings are bound to feel inadequate about the style of the previous inscription, so there is an inscription of "the image outside the image, the rhyme outside the result". In the following topics, we will talk about poems in particular.
There is a precedent for Song people to write poems directly on the screen. Li Bai, Du Fu, Bai Juyi, Wei Zhuang and other poets in the Tang Dynasty wrote poems with paintings, but most of them were written on other papers, and few of them were directly inscribed on the paintings, so they could not be used as a part of the paintings. It was only in the Song Dynasty that literati became interested in painting, and literati painters directly inscribed poems on the screen (themselves or others) as an integral part of painting, thus making the characteristics of Chinese painting more obvious.