Sardonic Dissonance in Xu Wei’s Parapaintings ca. 1573-1593

Without a discreet dis-aggregation of the pictorial image at the micro level of the brushtrace, literati parapainting’s seamless continuum of painting, calligraphy, and poetry could not have come into existence in the second quarter of the fourteenth century. In the late sixteenth century, the multitalented Xu Wei went much further, introducing a radically disjunctive dis-aggregation that opened up new avenues of sense-making, with far-reaching consequences for parapainting’s subsequent history.