Pictures worth a thousand words

The marriage of literature and illustrations is sometimes made possible by collaborations between great writers and artists. Fine examples of that at the exhibition are the drawings which Ding Cong, the famed illustrator, made for Four Generations Under One Roof (Si Shi Tong Tang), penned by Lao She the novelist and dramatist; the ones that Ye Qianyu, hailed "a master of sketches", tailor-made for Midnight (Ziye), a novel by Mao Dun; and those Huang Yongyu illustrated for Border Town (Biancheng), authored by his distant uncle Shen Congwen.

The exhibition also shows pictures that accompany folk tales, such as Ashima, a narrative poem of the Sani people of the Yi ethnic group in Yunnan province, modern poems and world literature, such as Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky and The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir.

Wu Weishan says visitors to the exhibition will find that those illustrations not only visualize the words and the meanings being implied, but also extend the vision of the reader to horizons farther and higher.