Poetry Appreciation of "Jinling Tu" Wei Zhuang, Jinling Tu Who says you can't paint with sadness? Paintings depict human feelings and human feelings. You see six pictures of events in the Southern Dynasties. Old wood and cold clouds fill the old city. This is a poem inscribed on a painting. The poet saw six paintings describing the historical events of the Southern Dynasties. He was deeply moved and wrote this poem. It is impossible to test who the painter is. What he painted was the story of the Six Dynasties of the Southern Dynasties (Eastern Wu, Eastern Jin, Song, Qi, Liang, and Chen), because all six dynasties had their capitals in Jinling. The painter did not whitewash the prosperity of the rulers of the Southern Dynasty, but wrote about its desolate decline. He painted many old trees and cold clouds in the painting, and painted a dangerous city with dilapidated battlements, which made people see that Jinling in the past three hundred years was not a lush imperial state, but an ancient city that made people feel sad. This is really different from ordinary historical paintings. Gao Chan, a poet who was slightly earlier than Wei Zhuang, wrote a poem "Looking at Jinling in the Evening": "I once returned to the evening green with floating clouds, and I still accompany the sunset with the sound of autumn. There are infinite painting hands in the world, and I can't paint a piece of sadness." The last two sentences, Feeling deeply. Gao Chan had a premonition that the Tang Dynasty was beset by crises and was irreversibly heading towards the end of total collapse. He felt distressed about this but was powerless to do anything. He attributed this potential crisis to "a sadness"; and this "sadness" cannot be expressed by ordinary painters. Wei Zhuang has obviously read Gao Chan's "Jinling Evening View". After he saw these six paintings of stories from the Southern Dynasties, Gao Chan's poem "I was so sad that I couldn't paint" seemed to resurface in his memory. "Is it really impossible to paint?" Look at these six stories of the Southern Dynasties, haven't they already painted "a sadness"! So he picked up his pen and seemed to retort to Gao Chan: "Who said you can't paint sadness? You can paint people's hearts and human feelings." Why can't he paint the "sadness" of society? It’s just that ordinary painters just want to cater to the vulgar psychology of the world and paint things that whitewash things for prosperity, rather than reflect the true face of society. After denying the statement that "painting cannot be done with sadness", the poet gave an excellent example: "Look at the six pictures of Southern Dynasties, old trees and cold clouds fill the old city." Please look at this "Picture of Jinling", on the picture The ancient trees are withered, the cold clouds are shrouded, and the place is desolate and desolate. Which of the six small courts in the Southern Dynasties was not ignorant and ignorant, and finally surrendered to the enemy and ended their short-lived history? This is a true portrayal of the bleak reality of Jinling during the past three hundred years. It is quite thought-provoking to compare Gao Chan's "Jinling Evening View" with this article.
One lamented, "It's impossible to paint a picture of sadness." The other retorted, "Isn't it possible to paint it now?" In fact, both of them used the old events of the Six Dynasties to express their deep worries about the reality of the late Tang Dynasty, and they had similar approaches in art.