Although it is common knowledge that Chinese poetry, calligraphy, and painting, known as san-chueh, or the three perfections, have been practiced together in single works of art, the precise relationship between them has yet to be fully explored.
The ideas that painting and poetry are interchangeable modes of expression and that an artist can readily transpose his creative impulse from one mode to the other tend to obscure their true relationship and their respective functions. Language and visual images are two distinct forms of expression; the imposition of one upon the other can either enhance or detract from their individual contributions.
The relationship between words and images in Chinese art developed from one of complementary illustration to one of complex integration—with a major shift occurring during the late Sung and the early Yuan dynasties, in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. After the development of realistic representation in painting reached its full flowering during the late Sung, early Yuan painters turned increasingly to symbolism. When eventually the image became overladen with symbolic meaning, it could no longer be expressed without the help of language. By brushing in a poem on his painting and thus using both word and image, the artist created a verbal discourse and a broader context in which to express himself.
It was Su Shih (1037-1101), the leading scholar-artist of the late Northern Sung dynasty, who first advocated that there is “poetry in painting and painting in poetry.” In an effort to represent true landscape, early Northern Sung painters first concentrated on capturing the principles of nature. As the painter felt the increasing need to express emotional response in his landscape, he turned to poetry for inspiration. In the second half of the eleventh century, the leading landscape master, Kuo Hsi, for example, regularly studied T’ang-dynasty landscape poems because they “create vivid scenes before one’s eyes.” Xie Zhiliu analyzes the Northern Sung landscape handscroll Summer Mountains, attributed to Ch'u Ting, juxtaposing the painted imagery with quotations from the famous fourth-century poet Hsieh Ling-yun. He sees the relationship between painting and poetry as one of shared “visual thinking,” and concludes that the two arts proceed from the same intellectual focus and emotional experience. Most landscape painters preferred the concise vision of five- or seven-word quatrains or couplets. Strung together with few grammatical connectives, Hsieh Ling-yun's five-word lines present a continuous series of concentrated images that readily translate into a landscape handscroll. The handscroll in turn unfolds with a moving focus that reads very much like lines of poetry. To read Hsieh Ling-yun’s poem along with Ch’u Ting’s landscape painting, one might imagine that the painter had composed his landscape while reading such a poem.
Qi Gong "Relationships between Poetry, Calligraphy, and Painting," takes us one step further, arguing that only those works that combine the artist's own poetry, calligraphy, and painting attain the highest form of artistic expression. Using both theoretical statements and concrete examples, Qi discusses the ability of each art form to enhance and to extend the expressive properties of the other two.