Awards

This research focuses on the Hongloumeng Painting Album drawn by Sun Wen and Sun Yunmo in the collection of Lushun Museum, which is a National Grade-One Cultural Relic. As the coloured-painting album of Hongloumeng discovered to date with the largest scale, most exquisite depictions, and most complete and detailed narrative episodes, it is not only a rare treasure in the history of Qing-dynasty painting, but also represents the pinnacle of visual dissemination of Hongloumeng. Since its emergence to the public in 2004, the album has earned renown at home and abroad, yet in-depth academic research on it remains insufficient.

From an interdisciplinary perspective, this thesis unfolds in accordance with the logical framework of “historical textual verification — artistic appreciation — status evaluation”. Adopting an array of methodologies including knowledge-production theory, artistic narratology, iconographic research and fieldwork, it systematically investigates numerous long-standing unresolved key issues concerning this “treasure of Redology”: its creation and provenance, artistic features, historical status, as well as the painters’ family backgrounds, life experiences, and artistic lineage. This study scrutinizes and revises established scholarly viewpoints, puts forward credible new insights drawing on exclusive documentary materials, and completes for the first time the collation and textual emendation of written sources.

On the one hand, this thesis examines how the painters reproduced the literary text through images. Specifically, confronted with Hongloumeng, the classic novel which is a complex epic with interwoven plotlines yet relatively weak storytelling and understated conflicts,what narrative strategies did the painters deploy to achieve the visual translation and narrative reconstruction of the literary text? On the other hand, it explores the interplay between images and knowledge: how was the painters’ creation shaped by prevailing knowledge systems, and what visual knowledge system did these images in turn construct? This research provides valuable theoretical references and empirical case studies for understanding the visual recreation and cross‑media narrativization of traditional Chinese literature.