The Subject:     The true s

The Artist:     Attributedeveryday life. 1

The Work:       Old Lai-tzu is an illustibly a penjing. 

The Artist:        Chao 95). 2

The Work:     The Reclining Pine depicts a flaa?

The Artist:     Li Shixin68). 3

1.    Wu, Yee-Sun  Man Lung Artistic Pot Plants (Hong Kong: Wing-Lung Bank Ltd; 1974, Second edition), pg. 30, with b&w photo; Sullivan, Michael  The Arts of China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press; 1984, Third Edition), pg. 159; Fitzgerald, C.P.  China, A Short Cultural History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press; 1985), pg. 299.

2.      Fairbank, John K., Edwin O. Reischauer and Albert M. Craig:  East Asia, Tradition & Transformation  (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company; 1989.  Revised Edition), pg. 45.  An 1873 Shanghai woodblock print is also shown on this page illustrating the same story.  In its lower right corner there are two tall containers, with triangular petals along the bottom and drum-nails along the top.  These pots hold flowering plants, somewhat stylized, with thin trunks/stems.  Compared to other portrayals of that era, there is no justification in terming the plants here as pentsai.

3.    Wu, pg. 32.  Pertaining to the early existence of wire in China, the twelfth-century writer Dong Yu [Tung Yu] said of the greatest Tang writer and possibly greatest master of painting in the history of the Far East: "Wu Daozi [Wu Tao-tzu, born c. A.D. 700]'s figures remind me of sculpture.  One can see them sideways and all around.  His linework consists of minute curves like rolled copper wire; however thickly his red or white paint is laid on, the structure of the forms and modelling of the flesh are never obscured." per Sullivan, pg. 125; Fitzgerald, pg. 447; the string theory, per conversation with Fred Carpenter at the Phoenix Bonsai Society, 12/15/92.

4.    Smith, Bradley and Wan-go Weng  China: A History in Art (A Gemini Smith Inc., Book published by Doubleday & Company; 1979), pg. 213, location given as Wan-go H.C. Weng, New York.

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