Introduction

Dates：2015/01/01~2015/03/25
Galleries：202,212

Throughout the course of Chinese history, many people have extolled the free and easy feeling of fish swimming leisurely in the water. During the Spring and Autumn period, for example, Duke Yin (ruler of the state of Lu) is recorded as having broken with protocol by insisting on visiting a fron-tier area just to appreciate how people catch fish. And from the Warring States era comes the “De-bate on the Hao Bridge” between Zhuangzi and Huishi about “The Joy of Fish,” a story familiar to many. In ancient Chinese art, depictions of fish range from painted pottery of the Neolithic Age to silk painting of the Pre-Qin era and illustrated bricks and tiles of the Han dynasty. And by the twelfth century, the imperial Xuanhe Painting Catalogue had divided painting into ten subjects, one of them being “Dragons and Fish.”

The National Palace Museum has a considerable collection of paintings with lively and interesting depictions of fish. “School of Fish Frolicking Among Water Plants” attributed to Liu Cai of the Song dynasty, for instance, shows fish swimming leisurely among plants. In “Cat with Fish and Aquatic Plants” by Shen Zhenlin of the Qing dynasty, the artist portrays a goldfish swimming to-wards a cat and oblivious to the danger. In terms of sheer skill in painting, Lang Shining (Giuseppe Castiglione) of the Qing dynasty, with his opaque colors and Western techniques, delicately ex-presses in his “Fish and Aquatic Plants” the surface sheen of fish and the volume of their features, placing this work squarely in the “sketching from life” tradition. Ma Hezhi’s “Clear Stream and Calling Crane” from the Song dynasty, on the other hand, represents the style known as “sketching ideas,” in which just a few strokes of the brush have been used here to suggest a school of fish flit-ting about the waters. Throughout the ages, Chinese paintings have not only portrayed images and actions of various kinds of fish, they also have often conveyed much auspicious meaning as well. For example, in the twentieth century, Qi Baishi in his “Great Prosperity for Many Years” depicted catfish and mandarin fish as an auspicious pun for the title, the names of these two fish in Chinese being homophones for “year” and “prosperity,” respectively.

The year 2015 marks the ninetieth anniversary of the National Palace Museum, and the Department of Painting and Calligraphy is holding a series of special exhibitions in celebration. This exhibit is part of its first rotation and coincides with the Chinese New Year, the offering of masterpieces with depictions of fish serving as an auspicious blessing for the New Year in the hope that all have years of plenty to come.