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Bilingual and intersemiotic representation of distance(s) in Chinese

landscape painting: From yi ('meaning') to yi ('freedom')

Article  in  Semiotica · September 2018

DOI: 10.1515/sem-2016-0226

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 Semiotica 2018; aop

Chengzhi Jiang and Chunshen Zhu*

Bilingual and intersemiotic representation
of distance(s) in Chinese landscape painting:
from yi (‘meaning’) to yi (‘freedom’)
https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2016-0226

Abstract: This paper studies cross-modal distance representation in traditional

Chinese landscape painting in a contemporary museum context with special
reference to the classic three axes of distance, i.e. level, deep, and high “dis-
tance.” It observes how an artwork’s “meaning” can be perceived through the
bilingual presentation of the “distances” to bring about the realization of a
“meditative distance,” or the artist’s aesthetic aspiration for a spiritual “free-
dom.” Informed by the theory of three meta-functions in Systemic Functional
Linguistics and Arnheim’s discussion about distance cues, the study has closely
examined a classical landscape painting in conjunction with its Chinese and
English bilingual museum captions, with a view to tracing out their discursive
meta-functions based on the visual-verbal coherence of distance representation.
In so doing, the study takes museum discourse as a holistic multimodal inter-
active process of different sign systems at three levels of communication (i.e.
extratextual, intersemiotic, and intertextual) to enable the modern viewer to
better appreciate the aesthetic aspiration nursed by the meaning of the picto-
rially depicted distance(s) in an ancient landscape painting. The findings of the
study will not only contribute to a better aesthetic contextualization of the
traditional Chinese visual arts but also, in a practical vein, to the construction
of a more informed museum discursive environment conducive to a spiritual
journey, or a mental transcendence, that keeps the mundane world at a “med-
itative distance.”

Keywords: intersemiotic/multimodal representation, Three Distances, Chinese

landscape painting, distance cue(s), museum text

*Corresponding author: Chunshen Zhu, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen),
Guangdong, China, E-mail: zhuchunshen@cuhk.edu.cn
ORCID iD:0000-0002-7225-5446
Chengzhi Jiang, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, China, E-mail: jiangchengzhi999@163.com;
ORCID iD:0000-0002-9196-9858

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2 Chengzhi Jiang and Chunshen Zhu

1 Introduction
The art of traditional Chinese landscape painting has developed from its early
emphasis on ink-brush techniques to an aesthetic fusion of painting, poetry
and calligraphy. However, the absence of the central perspective in composi-
tion has often led contemporary viewers, especially non-Chinese ones, to
believe that it is “all the more modern,” while admitting that reading
Chinese painting this way may fail to capture its artistic and spiritual aspira-
tions (Cahill 1977: 5). Viewing it either as a perspective-naïve representation
of the world with a pre-fifteenth century primitiveness or as a perspective-
defiant technique prefiguring twentieth century modernism, indeed, would
obscure the Chinese poetics of yi 意 (‘meaning,’ henceforth meaning) that
underlies poetry, calligraphy, and painting. This meaning, aspiring to a
domain beyond the immediacy of the surrounding world, has as its ultimate
goal another yi 逸 (‘freedom [(from worldly concerns) in the guise of leisure-
liness],’ henceforth freedom), a transcending indolence conducive to an
escape to a freedom that would elevate a somewhat frustrated member of
the country’s intelligentsia onto a purer and nobler spiritual being, by way of
a daring mode of artistic expression marked by a mien of abandonment as
well as originality in execution.1 This is probably why such painting is
traditionally called wenren hua 文人畫 (‘literati painting’), or xieyi shanshui
hua 寫意山水畫 (‘writing/drawing meaning mountain-water painting’), which
highlights its meaning-seeking aesthetics – to write down one’s meaning in
representing the “mountain-water” landscape.
The pictorial space delineated by such meaning-bearing “mountain-water”
in the painting is no longer an objective, still-life depiction of the real landscape
perceived. Therefore, it is to be read – indeed the terminology has it that
painting is writing and viewing is reading – as a projection of the mental
space conceived by the artist, as a promise of an escape to, or a symbol of, a
spiritual freedom called xuan yuan 玄遠 (‘meditative distance,’ henceforth
Meditative Distance) in Xu’s terms (2010: 262–264), an art-induced spiritual
distance from the confinement of the object’s formal accuracy and of the
material world’s banality, a poetic meditation or reverie the artist invites the
viewer to join and share, so to speak. Being the presentation of a symbolic
space, its composition refuses to converge on a vanishing point that helps
stabilize the world with proportional coherence. Instead, such a space is sus-
tained by a dynamic configuration of three axes which are termed three

1 For this freedom, as an artistic credo, see Peng (1995: ch. 1) and Lin (1987: 84–84).

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 Bilingual and intersemiotic representation 3

directions of yuan 遠 (‘distance’): ping yuan 平遠 (‘level distance’), shen yuan

深遠 (‘deep distance’), and gao yuan 高遠 (‘high distance’), put forth by Guo Xi
(1023–1085, henceforth the [Three] Distances, or respectively, Level, Deep, and
High Distances; see Section 2).
Technically, the three axes of distance maintain the depth of a pictorial
space, but by calling them “distances,” they suggest a visual-mental or “med-
itative” journey from the centrality of the viewer to a “distant” land that is deep
and high in, or even beyond, the scene. It is therefore interesting to note that, by
default or by design, such landscape painting is complemented, or rather
invested, with a “human meaning” (or zu renyi ‘足人意’ in Guo’s terms, see
Zhongguo meixueshi ziliao xuanbian II 1981: 13 in association with displacement
(normally from the mundane environment of a worldly residence) or travel (with
the inclusion of a wayfarer or a convoy for instance). Thus in transfiguring the
real world, the artist’s subjectivity is written into the pictorial space recon-
structed along the three orientations of distance.
In appreciating the meaning, it is thus of pivotal importance to be aware of
the aesthetic significance of the Three Distances in Chinese landscape painting
(see Section 2). The trinity means that a landscape painting should visualize the
height, depth, and level extension of the landscape, regardless of whether the
pictorial depiction remains really true to the external world. Since the Song
dynasty (960–1279), it has been perceived not only as a set of techniques but
also as a medium of meaning expression. Since such paintings nowadays are
normally presented in modern museums and galleries accompanied by verbal
descriptions, the Three Distances are not only “shown” in the artwork, but also
“told” verbally in captions. How such verbal texts work, cross-semiotically and
intertextually, in conjunction with their artwork subjects to induce a viewing
experience of the Distances can thus be of critical interest. Given its own cultural
origin and the multiculturality of its intended audience, Chinese landscape
painting displayed in museums and galleries tends to be verbally portrayed in
more than one language, typically in Chinese and English. And given the
differences between the two languages and between the two cultures in ques-
tion, how would the linguistic presentations do justice to the manifestation of
the meaning-bearing Distances they are designed to annotate? This is the topic of
our present study, which is to observe the representation of the Distances in the
label directly attached to a displayed Chinese landscape painting. Such catalo-
gue entries or captions form a sub-genre of museum texts that serves as “the
principal in-depth educational resources for the exhibition” (Dean 1994: 109–
110) to convey “the inherent value of the work,” and guide viewers “to under-
stand why the work is worth looking at and is worth reading about” (Barnet
2008: 154).

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4 Chengzhi Jiang and Chunshen Zhu

To this end, this paper explores the association between the verbalization of
visual information, in the form of Distance Cues (henceforth DCs)2 in particular,
and the realization of the meta-functions (i.e. representational, modal, and
compositional functions, see O’Toole 1994) of the visual artwork in the bilingual
representation of distance in captions. After a historical overview of the notion
distance in traditional Chinese painting, the paper will propose a semiotic-
linguistic approach to describe the interaction of visual and verbal elements in
museum discourse. Apart from semantic analysis, it will also apply a set of
visual-auditory DCs in its analysis of the verbal representation of the Distances
in bilingual museum texts, in particular their implications for the realization of
the three meta-functions of a visual artwork. O’Toole has initially identified
these functions in visual works in parallel with the ideational, interpersonal,
and textual metafunctions in verbal communication characterized in the
Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics. Attention is then focused on how
space, distance, and depth are technically presented by means of DCs across
visual and verbal representation to suggest meaning and freedom. In both
pictorial and verbal composition, according to Arnheim (1974), DCs contribute
to the projection of space, distance, and/or depth (see Arnheim 1974; Jiang 2012)
by providing a subtle perspective to secure visual and textual coherence.
Following the theorization in Sections 2 and 3, our observation will be substan-
tiated in Section 4 with an in-depth analysis of the Strumming the Zither Under
Trees 《林下鳴琴》by Zhu Derun 朱德潤 (AD 1294–1365) alongside two of its
bilingual museum catalogue entries.

2 Three Distances in traditional Chinese painting

Since its inception in the third and fifth centuries, Chinese landscape painting
has evolved through the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) into an independent genre
that conveys multiple convictions and a refined scholarly taste, representing “a
peak of the Chinese artistic genius” (Briessen 1998: 48). Its notorious deficiency
of linear perspective has now been regarded as “specific methods of visual
representation,” after centuries’ struggle “with the most elementary problems
of space and depth” (Turner 2009: 107), that serve to break through, as noted
above, the confinement of the formal exactitude of the objective world.

2 The term “Distance Cues” comes from Arnheim’s visual perception theory, referring to
different techniques of presenting visual information that implies distance or depth on a two-
dimensional pictorial plane.

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 Bilingual and intersemiotic representation 5

Technically, the Three Distances indicate three principal compositional

schemes in Chinese landscape painting to sustain a coherent pictorial
composition:

Mountains have three distances: looking up to the mountain’s peak from its base is called
“high distance.” From in front of the mountain, spying past it to what is behind is called
“deep distance.” Gazing from a nearby mountain at those distant is called “level distance.”
(Guo Xi, quoted in Murashige 1995:342)

The trinity entails a “shifting standpoint,” according to Tuan (1974: 137), and has
marked the technical exploration of what Fong and Hearn (1982: 7) call an
“illusionistic depth” that visualizes the artist’s mental world. Such theoretical
and methodological preference in turn brings to light the ultimate aesthetic
pursuit of Chinese landscape painting – “to suggest infinite space” (Fong and
Hearn 1982: 15) in which a meditative mind would find its refuge. A painting is
thus not meant to be a pictorial copy of the real world. With nature being
represented in “a highly schematic and intellectual format” (Lee 1962: 23), it
presents instead an imaginary, or idealized, landscape that conveys not the
substance of the world as such, but “the meaning and beauty behind nature’s
physical phenomena” (Cheng 1994: 83).

3 Distance representation in museum catalogue

entries
In our semiotic-linguistic reading of Chinese landscape paintings with their
(bilingual) museum captions, any word, sound, gesture or object presented
can be regarded as a semiotic sign, and a message can be transmitted in any
medium, verbal or non-verbal, or both. A semiotic approach to Chinese land-
scape paintings treats

… certain motifs and features of compositions as signs that carry meaning. Semiotics
assumes a system of signification, a kind of code, which people of the artist’s time
understood without thinking about it or having to explain it to each other. The code will
not be found written out, then, in texts of the time, but must be unlocked, recovered from
the works themselves with the help of whatever clues are provided by inscription and other
texts. (Cahill 1988: 41)

This is so because Chinese landscape painting “aims at representing inner

essences, not outer forms” (Cahill 1982: 2) and “the educated elite” are “valuing
symbolic communication over literal pictorial representation” (Murck 2000: 188).

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6 Chengzhi Jiang and Chunshen Zhu

This point, according to Cahill, is seen in Mi Fu’s 米芾 (c.1051–1107) remark that

“[landscape] is a creation of the mind and is intrinsically a superior art” (quoted in
Bush and Shih 1985: 220–221). In this connection, the presence of bilingual
captions as cross-modal/intersemiotic co-texts of the displayed paintings, is sup-
posed to facilitate viewers’ appreciation of the artwork’s genic and generic expres-
sion of leisurely freedom suggested by the meaning-bearing, pictorially presented
motifs and images. Grounded in the Hallidayan theory of three meta-functions,
O’Toole’s functional semiotic model (1994) theorizes about the “dynamic inter-
play” between the code of visual sign system and its instances of use, making it
possible to further examine the visual-verbal coherence between a painting and
its verbal presentation. The basic assumption of his model is that there are three
meta-functions in every instance of communication (O’Toole 1994: 216, 232):

(1) The representational function: what the artwork depicts;

(2) The modal function: how the artwork engages the viewer’s attention;
(3) The compositional function: how the artwork is structured into a whole.

As in the production of verbal texts, a painting is the corollary of systems of

choices to realize its meta-functions at each rank of meaning unit from school/
genre, picture, episode, figure, etc. In Chinese landscape painting, as its Chinese
name “mountain-water painting” indicates, there seems to be some common
pattern of motifs for the representational function in most cases, in which the
work’s “human meaning” is fulfilled by the presence of some human activities
among the dominating mountains and rivers, as noted by Guo (Sickman and
Soper 1968: 206). In realizing the modal function of distance representation,
“long, steep diagonals, or a zigzag recession with stages marked by buildings
diminishing in size” would induce “a strong sense of penetration into depth”
coupled with “(t)he pale, indistinctive rendering of forms” usually occurring “in
the far distance” (Cahill 1982: 16, 34). The representational and modal functions
are enabled by a composition that, by various cohesion devices, integrates the
pictorial images into an artistic whole that communicates a coherent meaning
along the axes of the Three Distances. Between pictorial and verbal representa-
tions of the meaning-communicating Distances, discrepancies may arise due to
modal differences, and the situation may be compounded in a bilingual context
by linguistic and cultural disparity. First, textual means can be different between
the parallel captions in their explicating the artwork’s meta-functions in
response to the cultural background of respective viewers and the textual
resources provided by each language. And second, there are modal differences
between visual and verbal representations although the meta-functions they are
striving to realize are corresponding in nature. As such, a close examination of a

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 Bilingual and intersemiotic representation 7

bilingual pair of captions with the original painting as their urtext (in our case
English and Chinese captions of a traditional Chinese landscape painting) can
provide an interesting cross-semiotic and cross-modal context to observe how
the meaning and freedom has been verbally as well as pictorially communicated
to viewers from different lingual and cultural backgrounds. From a holistic
perspective, observed discrepancies will not be construed as absolute distinc-
tions but rather as multimodal interactions of a complementary kind as far as
artistic appreciation is concerned. We propose to study the phenomenon at three
levels, namely, extratextual, intersemiotic, and intertextual, to encompass both
visual and verbal mode of information communication.

3.1 Extratextual interrelations via Distance Cues (DCs)

The extratextual refers to interrelations between the displayed artwork and nature.
Art perception and art creation are compatible because both closely associate with
the knowledge of “significant structural features or patterns through the princi-
ples of organization” (Hagen 1980: 11). Since the Three Distances are not only
basic schemes of pictorial formulation, but also “three types of perspective that
situate the relationship between man and the universe” (Cheng 1994: 105), DCs
are adopted as a set of analytical tools to gauge the Distances. As in Arnheim’s
theory of visual perception (1974), visual and auditory DCs mainly include: (1)
Deformation (of size or position); (2) Overlapping/Transparency; (3) Tone/Value
(of color); (4) Gradients (of density, detail, color, texture, or pattern); (5) Sound
Intensity; and (6) Echo (i.e. reverberant sound; see Jiang 2012: 1643). In Chinese,
DCs are realized essentially in the use of brushstroke and the handling of ink, as
Cahill (1982: 4) has pointed out, “[c]onsiderations of space, atmosphere, and scale
are subordinated to an overriding concern with brush-and-ink configurations … ”

3.2 Intersemiotic interrelations

The intersemiotic covers visual-verbal and bilingual (interlingual) interrelations,
as the visual-verbal conveyance of information by definition involves interse-
miotic translation (Jakobson 2000: 114). Painting represents the real world in
such a holistic and multidimensional manner that spatial relations are presented
all at once at first sighting. By contrast, linguistic presentation is more linear, so
the translation of information from painting to caption represents a cross-modal
process. In museums, the caption is not an independent text but to eventually
direct the viewer back to the painting. Hence pictorial composition normally

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8 Chengzhi Jiang and Chunshen Zhu

preconditions the re-construction of distance-related information in the caption.

This explains theoretical and methodological relevance of O’Toole’s meta-func-
tional model to our present visual-verbal discourse analysis.
Secondly, interlingual translation is understood as a mode of bilingual
composition, with two texts in different languages striving to represent their
common urtext, the pictorial exhibit in our case, whether or not they are over-
lapping in content or by the same author (Jakobson 2000: 118). As far as
language is an effective cognitive means to model the world, it should be a
reasonable assumption that DCs are working equally well in both visual and
verbal representations of the Three Distances and should be comparable in
cross-modal formulations. As in perceiving the physical world, where informa-
tion that allows us to realize the horizontal distance works as the basic experi-
ential axis for construing height and depth, in a pictorial representation the
Level Distance is foundational in bringing the High and the Deep Distance into
perspective, a perspective of the Meditative Distance or spiritual profundity to be
sure. In Chinese landscape painting, as we have noted above, this is facilitated
by the adoption of a shifting standpoint that conditions, or even shapes, the
viewer’s aesthetic perception of the artistic features inherent in the artwork on a
macroscopic level. And on the microscopic level, it is supported by the deploy-
ment of DCs, which are common to both Chinese and non-Chinese traditions of
the visual arts in realizing the three meta-functions.

3.3 Intertextual interrelations

Intertextual interrelations concern the connections between a sign and the socio-
cultural network from which it comes. For example, a given Chinese caption may
share its discursive properties with other Chinese captions in terms of terminology,
cultural referencing, and generic formation. Between the two captions of a bilingual
and bicultural pair, intertextuality is also related to how the two captions of the
same painting have drawn on the verbal resources available in their respective
cultures, hence there is a “double intertextuality” in Neubert and Shreve’s (1992:
118) terms, which we shall be observing in the following case study.

4 Strumming the Zither Under Trees: a case study

Our case study focuses on the Strumming the Zither Under Trees (Figure 1) by Zhu
Derun (1271–1368), a famous landscape painter subscribing to the tradition of Li

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 Bilingual and intersemiotic representation 9

Figure 1: Zhu Derun’s Strumming the Zither Under Trees (National Palace Museum, Taipei).

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10 Chengzhi Jiang and Chunshen Zhu

Cheng’s and Guo Xi’s styles (Cahill 1976: 79). The work is now held by the
National Palace Museum, Taipei, with the bilingual captions collected from the
same physical museum and its website in 2009. According to the inscription at
the top of the scroll, this painting depicts a get-together of certain scholars on an
autumn day.3 Selection of the painting was based on the following
considerations.
For a Chinese painting, “[p]hysical facts … account for only a part of the
meaning of the painting” (Cahill 1982: 29). The meaning that an individual
painting conveys in particular as well as the meaning that Chinese literati’s
landscape paintings share and treasure in general, as seen in “the choice of
motifs and symbols,” is conventional, and even “restricted by a long tradition”
(Sirén 1949: 35). And Zhu was traditionally regarded a Confucian scholar-painter
whose style was rather conservative with limited creativity (Loeher 1980: 255),
while his Strumming the Zither Under Trees is widely held as a representative
work of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Chinese landscape painting.
Technically, the painting presents the Three Distances in a rather balanced
composition whereas many others hinge on one Distance as the dominant axis
(see, for example, Murck 2000: 121–122), a feature that has been noted in both
the Chinese and English captions, albeit, as we shall see, in somewhat different
manners. As such, the work furnishes a plausible example to observe the three
types of interaction, namely, extratextural, intersemiotic, and intertextual,
enabled by the compositional structuring of the Distance-related information
in the Chinese and English caption texts and the painting itself, to enable us to
see how the presentation of the Distances works to convey a meaning that points
to a care-free freedom, which, in turn, would inspire a spiritual Meditative
Distance.
The first relationship to be established is the extratexual interaction between
the artwork and nature as seen in the configuration of pictorial images, by which
nature is represented in a specifically humanized context sustained by human
figures, trees, a river, distant mountains, and a temple-like building. As we can
see, in the foreground of the painting, the relatively small size of the human
figures sets off a towering grove of pine trees depicted in detail, while the use of
dark ink works by two DCs of Gradients and Tone/Value to stress the visual
conspicuity and modal significance of the pine trees, a perpetual symbol of
personal integrity in Chinese poetics. Visibility of details suggests closeness,
positioning the viewer at a standpoint at an imaginary height to look, along the
axis of High Distance marked by the trees, down at the three human figures

3 See http://painting.npm.gov.tw/npm_public/System/View.jsp?type=1&ObjectID=2164
(accessed 10 December 2013).

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 Bilingual and intersemiotic representation 11

dressed as scholars, and then along the Level Distance cued by the river and the
flying birds towards those images far in the background, a vista that, thanks to
the meandering range of hills and mists, seems to extend into an infinite Deep
Distance. If a line in visual perception is to be believed to usually “disclose an
inner sound of artistic significance” (Kandinsky 1994: 425), then the disclosure
in this case should enable the viewer to trace along the verticality of the trees
downwards from the height to the source of the “sound” in the focal triangle of
the scholars seated under the trees. The stability of the formation is maintained
by their gazes, in which two of them look at each other, apparently engaging in
a conversion. The third one, the zither player, by facing the first two seems to
help, as it were, to rein in any wandering gaze on the viewer’s part onto this
focal triangle for a longer while. The focus is maintained within a discernible
bigger, secondary triangle with both the fisherman and the attendant at the
stream’s edge looking back towards the scholars as if attracted by their words or
music. The “human meaning” is thus asserted in a two-level focal triangle in the
foreground, before the viewer’s gaze is released to travel further into the
distance.
In the middle ground, there is a stretch of blankness across the scroll, and
the presence of the fisherman and his boat suggests it stand for a mist-clad river
that links the foreground focus to the distant mountains and further to the skies
above and beyond. The polysemic nature of this colorless blank, or “whiteness”
in Wittgenstein’s terms (2007: 42e), suggests a three-fold interpretability: the sky
(clouds) or mist, a river (water) and the paper itself. The intertextuality of these
possibilities may inspire an imagination about the expanse of an unlimited
space, with the river stringing together the foreground and middle ground
scenes to lead the viewer’s gaze from the focal human images into the distance.
This may serve as a preliminary illustration as to how the compositional pre-
sence of a cluster of images plays out its representational and modal functions
in enabling the extratexual interaction between the artwork and nature.
A line of birds across the middle ground is also notable in that it enlivens
the river and mist and, as a dynamic “flying” image, takes the viewer into the
mountains to meet, so to speak, a temple-looking building. The building, to be
sure, appears in perspective terms disproportionately large and rich in detail
compared to the surrounding hills, and thus, by Overlapping/Transparency and
Gradients, stands out as a focus in the background with its temple-likeness
suggesting the divinity of human meaning hidden otherworldly in a Deep
Distance.
The overall visual pragmatic effect this mountain-and-river scene activates
is similar to what Zhu has described as the visual impact of mountain-images in
traditional Chinese painting:

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12 Chengzhi Jiang and Chunshen Zhu

… [the composition] conjures … wave-like outlines of the ridges which the eye would
follow, eventually out of the [mental] picture, to the infinity of space … One of the most
common techniques, usually employed in conjunction with “aerial perspective,” is to let
the outlines of ridges run, intermittently perhaps, to be cut short in the course, as it were,
by the confines of the frame, while the momentum of these dynamic lines is expected to
carry on to evoke an unlimited expanse that can only be seen in the mind … (Zhu 1999:
169–170)

In the present case, the visual rhythm of the imagery configuration can be
further realized with reference to the layout in which the river has divided the
vista into two halves. The lower half is visually occupied by those tall trees and
human figures and cognitively buzzed with various sounds, the human sound of
the music and voice, and nature’s sound of the water in the stream, the wind in
the trees, and perhaps the birds in the sky. In the quiet of the upper half, the
temple can also be a sonic source if an intertextual reading of the painting
reminds the viewer of the poet Wang Wei’s (692–761, or 699–759) wonder in one
of his much cited poems: “Deep in the peaks whence comes the echoing bell?”
(2004: 74). Zhu’s work thus epitomizes a compositional rhythm that develops
through the contrast between sound and quietude of the environment cued by
the Sound Intensity and the compositional chiaroscuro of black (or colors) and
white (or blank), to bear the viewer’s mind, so to speak, away from the mundane
worldly business into a Deep Distance that promises a divine leisureliness.
Now, let us move from the above close reading of the painting on to the
cross-modal and intertextual issue of visual-verbal coherence to see how the
verbal captions work with the artwork to facilitate viewers’ appreciation of the
painting’s artistic and spiritual significance. Normally, the museum caption
provides a brief explanatory note to guide the viewing of the artwork in question
(Jiang 2012: 1640, 1646). The following analysis will therefore treat the painting
and its Chinese and English captions as a coherent triad that strives to unveil,
visually and verbally, the spiritual connotation of the landscape depicted.

Chinese version (Author’s translation will be used in the discussion.)

畫松樹三株，矗立江邊，松下三人琴會高談，一漁翁持槳輕曳而至，童子
臨流汲水，回望江天，一片遼闊。隔岸坡陀起伏，崗巒層立，煙霧空濛。
近景主樹幾佔全幅的一半，畫樹皴石墨色濃鬱，描寫細膩，隔水對岸的山
石林木則盡量簡化，層層推遠，大部份隱於嵐霧之中。使畫面形成細密繁
複與疏朗鬆秀的對比。利用濃淡墨色相間，簡化物象，使畫幅更形開闊。

English version
Shown in this painting is a group of three scholars sitting under a cluster of
trees along the shore. One of them is strumming the zither as a fisherman in

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 Bilingual and intersemiotic representation 13

a skiff seems to paddle closer in order to listen to the music. An attendant at

the stream’s edge turns his head and gazes back at the scholars. The
composition is centered round these figures under the massive trees. A
diagonal line of birds in flight echoes the angle of the shore extending
into the distance, where the roof of a building emerges from the mist. The
mist-drenched scene extends even further, evoking the sense of a pure and
elegant atmosphere.

The pine trees are firstly associated with the zither in the title’s transitivity
process of strumming:

Chinese: 林下 鳴 琴
Gloss: under trees strum the zither
English: Strumming the Zither Under Trees

With the subject omitted, the title emphasizes environment, action, and sound
in the foreground scene to begin with, leaving viewers to identify for themselves
the species of the trees and the status of the focal human figures by tapping into
cultural resources, since these images are among the key motifs in the genre.
And pine trees, in particular, are a conventional metaphor for men of principle
in Chinese culture (Murck 2000: 163), as Confucius has remarked in The
Analects, “[o]nly after the seasons turn cold can we know the resolve of pine
and cypress” (1998: 98), that is, “only in times of cries does the integrity of the
gentleman manifest itself clearly” (1997: 107). In the company of the pine trees
the spirituality of zither-playing is heightened, which is the first of the Four Arts
a traditional Chinese scholar is expected to attain (the other three being chess
playing, calligraphy, and painting) and a special avenue of seeking perfection in
artistic, scholastic or ethical pursuits for self-cultivation in the guise of freedom,
the fretted instrument hence has been a recurring motif standing for camarad-
erie among scholars sharing an élite taste in classical Chinese painting and
poetry (as in The Book of Songs, for instance; see Waley 1996: 133).
In presenting the foreground scene, the Chinese caption confirms the spe-
cies of the trees, starting with the “three pine trees towering on the shore” before
turning to the “three persons under the trees playing the zither and chatting
freely in high spirits.” The word “towering” spells out the conspicuity of the
pines and the impact of the visual effect of the High Distance thus marked,
preparing the viewer for the subsequent description of the seemingly unusual
distribution of images in which “the main trees in the foreground almost take up
one half of the whole painting plane.” The elegance and cultured freedom
triggered by the zither-playing and joyous chatting under the pine trees will

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14 Chengzhi Jiang and Chunshen Zhu

thus become more meaningful in bringing about the meditation to reach a

spiritual distance, or depth if one is aware – as a traditional Chinese scholar
would be – of the quality of the instrument’s sound that is “unhurriedly mild
and pure, and harmoniously smooth as if coming from the distance” (Xu 1982:
117, authors’ translation). Fan Zhongyan 范仲淹 (989–1052), a prominent man of
letters in Chinese history, further explains that “[I]f unhurriedly mild but
impure, the music will sound turbulent; if harmoniously smooth but not sound-
ing as if from the distance, it would be obsequious. Being neither turbulent nor
obsequious, isn’t it the doctrine of the golden mean?” (authors’ translation).
Thus initiated, the viewer would acquire a keener “mental ear” to the rhythm of
the zither music, following it into a Meditative Distance where an ideal person-
ality is coherent with the doctrine of the golden mean, the core credo of both
Confucianism and Daoism. All these details at once bear out the scene’s repre-
sentational and modal meanings, to suggest an intellectual tradition that
emphasizes the spirituality of arts conducive to a metaphysical meditation. By
contrast, the English version gives this episode a rather brief mention, starting
from the “three scholars” to the “cluster of [unspecified] trees” and then to “the
shore” in the first sentence. Apart from sitting and strumming in the second
sentence, an obvious factual gloss of the title and the painting, no detail about
the trees or human action is given to hint at the modal significance of these focal
figures to English-speaking viewers, whereas the secondary fisherman and
attendant have been more heavily depicted and thus may engage more of the
viewer’s attention.
As noted above, over the top of the tall trees in the painting, there is a
transitional area of blankness dotted with “a diagonal line of birds,” which is
picked up in the English caption but not in the Chinese. Moreover, the two
versions describe the compositional deployment of the scholars, the fisherman
and the attendant somewhat differently. While the fisherman “paddles his way
towards [them]” in the Chinese may have a “purer” modal function of establish-
ing the spatial relation between the scholars and the fisherman, the attendant’s
looking back, but “towards the river and the sky,” however, may direct the
viewer’s attention away from the triangle. The focal triangle is more coherently
confirmed in the English, though, where the attendant is presented as gazing
“back at the scholars” and the fisherman paddling closer to the seated scholars,
although the fisherman may have claimed too much attention when the pad-
dling is specified as “in order to listen to the music.” While the attendant’s
looking “towards the river and the sky” in the Chinese version may arguably
facilitate a transition from the Level to the High Distance extending deep into “a
vast extension of space” in the upper part of the vista, the attendant’s gaze in
the English would keep the viewer’s eye longer on the scholars, before it picks

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 Bilingual and intersemiotic representation 15

up and follows the “diagonal line of birds in flight” along “the angle of the
shore” into the High Distance, to be greeted, and carried further on, by “the roof
of a building.” In comparison, therefore, the Chinese text seems to chart out a
scanning that, in terms of the representational, places less emphasis on the focal
triangle. It thus appears to be quicker in taking the viewer into “a vast extension
of space” of hills and vapory mist. In general, viewers following the Chinese
presentation would be moving back from the background to the trees in the
foreground before being transported again “into the far distance” to find in the
painting for themselves a building beckoning from among hills and mists.
It is interesting to note that, as Zhu’s painting shows, the so-called Deep
Distance often merges with the High in configuring overlapping peaks and
valleys to attain a certain visual and cognitive profundity aptly denoted by the
word gaoshen (高深, ‘high deep’) in Chinese. To register this quality, the Level
Distance, apart from creating an illusion of horizontal broadness, is often used
as a connector, or “gesture of demonstration” as Gandelman (1991: 14) would
call it, to secure the visual coherence of height and depth in a vista, as the river
(shore) and the mists in the picture have shown. Both captions have noted this
extratextual interaction between the Distances, albeit worded somewhat differ-
ently, by drawing the viewer’s attention to such details as the river bank in the
Chinese (“On the other side of the river, slopes undulate”) and the bank and the
birds in the English (“A diagonal line of birds in flight echoes the angle of the
shore”). The presentation of the Deep Distance in the Chinese is further cued by
the Gradients in its description of the contrast between the foreground objects
that are said to have been minutely painted and the sketchiness of those in the
distance. The English, however, does not seem to have taken note of such
technicalities. Instead, it picks on the birds and the dynamics of their formation
(a “diagonal line”) to engage the viewer’s attention. As far as verbal presentation
is concerned, further specification of such key details would help its audiences,
given their non-Chinese or non-classical backgrounds, to appreciate the images’
modal significance in savouring what Cahill (1977: 5) would call the “sense of a
pure and elegant atmosphere,” or the work’s “original meaning.” Along this line
of observation, as specifying the species of the trees noted above, specification
of the species of the birds, for instance as wild geese or swans (migrant yan 雁),
would have bestowed on the painting an increased intertextual density, for in
classical Chinese literature, the migrant wild goose is a motif standing for loyalty
and friendship that remains unchanged in adversity. Such specification can be
an expression of the spiritual aspiration of those scholars or the painter himself.
In Xu’s terms, this can be “the soaring aspiration of the recluse of virtue through
the high ambition of the wild swan” (Xu 1982: 139), or, as the Chinese set phrase

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16 Chengzhi Jiang and Chunshen Zhu

has it, the honghu zhi zhi 鴻鵠之志, i.e. an ambition comparable to the determi-
nation and perseverance in wild geese and noble swans.
In ancient China, the recluse has been a favorite symbol for those who failed
to, or chose not to, pursue a career in officialdom, indicating a paradox between
a spiritual alienation and an eager aspiration to partaking in a good governance.
The following observations may serve to further explain this paradox in literati’s
personal lives as reflected in their artistic creation:

(1) As the literati grew in number far beyond the capacity of the bureaucracy to
accommodate them, alternate life styles arose that sought fulfillment out-
side officialdom (Strassberg 1994: 56).
(2) Faced with the failure of the human order, learned men sought permanence
within the natural world, retreating into the mountains to find a sanctuary
from the chaos of dynastic collapse.4

Landscape painting, among other artistic genres, has therefore been appreciated
more as “a means of conveying the inner landscape of the artist’s heart and mind”
than an authentic “description of the visible world,” a means for themselves and their
learned audiences to experience a visual-mental journey into a Meditative Distance
following the pictorial Distances to realize a spiritual freedom from worldly affairs.
The verb “[slopes] undulate” in the Chinese caption semantically refers to a
wave-like outline of hills in the distance, leading the Level Distance into a vista
of the Deep Distance suggested by the Overlapping/Transparency in the verb
“[hills] arise [one behind another].” In the English, while verbs such as “strum,”
“paddle,” “listen,” and “gaze” mark out the focal triangles, the Deformation
cued by the epithet “diagonal” and the Overlapping/Transparency by the verb
“emerge” register a Deep Distance, to be confirmed by the Overlapping/
Transparency in the epithet “mist-drenched,” with the verb “extend” suggesting
a sense of Level Distance. As far as distance cues are concerned, overlapping or
transparency is salient in both captions. In this connection, the use of whiteness
across the scroll by which the water in the foreground pictorially merges into the
mist to maintain a misty High and Deep Distance deserves a special mention.
In Chinese cosmology, mist is perceived as “a manifestation of the earth’s
vitality (‘qi’), the breadth of the mountain, the vehicle for auspicious rains, and
[culturally] a symbol of the wandering scholar, free and aloof” (Murck 2000:
110). Having mountains and forests wrapped in or buoyed by mists in landscape
paintings thus conveys a rhythmic altitude with a transcendental calm and
aloofness. The feature is noted matter-of-factly in both captions of Zhu’s

4 http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/clpg/hd_clpg.htm (accessed on 21 November 2016).

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 Bilingual and intersemiotic representation 17

work – either “[hills and trees] in the mist” or “the mist-drenched scene” –
instead of being taken as a “deficient” depiction of the mountains blurred by
mist and haze (see Murashige 1995: 347, 342). Indeed, as Guo observes, only in
mist and haze will mountains look “vague, indistinct and boundless” (Sirén
1949: 31) – a presentation that technically elicits a sense of depth and distance to
integrate the High and Level Distances with “a quality of transcendence”
(Struman 1989: 246). Artistically, with high mountains symbolizing an immova-
ble resolution, the mist or cloud will furnish “an image of freedom, freedom
from involvement, freedom from misery” (Confucius 1998: 71) in “the limitless
realms” of an artist’s “creative imagination” (Sirén 1949: 31). With the inspirited,
towering mountains, the artist’s romantic longing for freedom soars “upwards”
from meaning to freedom to keep the material world at a mysterious and
meditative distance, so to speak. In Zhu’s painting, as noted above, this spiritual
flight is greeted by a temple-looking building deep in the mountains, an image
that was neglected in the Chinese caption but was picked up in the English –
“the roof of a building emerges from the mist.” As such, the English text can be
of more help in alerting the viewer to this human dwelling high above a
mundane world, although the text does not specify the subtle detail about the
building that could suggest the divinity of the flight.

5 Conclusion
The aesthetic preference of the Three Distances has long been described as an
artistic specificity that not only distinguishes the Chinese literati’s landscape
painting from its Western counterparts, but also establishes the connection
between this art form and ancient Chinese cosmology. Given that such paintings
are nowadays displayed in museums and galleries out of their ancient contexts
and normally accompanied by verbal captions to help viewers appreciate their
artistic merits, we have in this study observed the Distances’ artistic significance
by examining Zhu Derun’s Strumming the Zither Under Trees in conjunction with
two of its captions respectively in Chinese and English within a three-level
theoretical framework of the extratextual, intersemiotic, and intertextual,
which is informed by O’Toole’s Hallidayan functional model and Arnheim’s
system of Distance Cues. The case study illustrates and explains the inter-
semiotic and cross-modal coherence between visual and verbal presentations
and its implications for shaping the viewer’s experience of art appreciation. The
similarities and differences observed among the three suggest that, while verbal
captions are complementary to the pictorial artwork in sensitizing viewers to the

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18 Chengzhi Jiang and Chunshen Zhu

work’s artistic and cognitive significance across historical, social and cultural
gaps, an awareness of the governing theme and the artistic execution of the
artwork will help consolidate the inter-semiotic, cross-modal, intertextual, and
cross-lingual if necessary, coherence between verbal and visual presentations.
In our case this governing theme has been identified as meaning and freedom
artistically suggested in the realization of the Level, High, and Deep Distances
conducive to a Meditative Distance in which the aesthetics of traditional Chinese
landscape paintings resides.

Funding: This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the
Central Universities at Wuhan University, Grant No.: 410500056; and by a
General Research Fund (GRF), Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong
Special Administrative Region, China., Grant No.: CityU 11606515.

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