Reverse Ekphrasis: Teaching Poetry-inspired Chinese Brush Painting Workshops – in English

Abstract

The artistic practices of ekphrasis and reverse ekphrasis – integrating poetry and painting in their unique forms – have been long-standing conventions both in the East and in the West. This article attempts to rationalise the new functions of the age-old concept of reverse ekphrasis (i.e. graphic representation of verbal representation) as reactivated for the purposes of today's university-level art education, and as exemplified by the international workshops of poetry-inspired Chinese brush painting that I taught at The University of Central Lancashire (UCLan), UK, from 2012 to 2016, using English not only as a convenient contact language for art education, but also as a powerful vehicle for poetic self-reflection, intertextual adaptation and intermedial transformation. To be more concise, my teaching approaches featured CREATE – Contact (C), Reverse Ekphrasis (R, E), Adaptation (A), Transformation (T) and Enrichment (E). The international workshop participants’ creative painting outcomes proved that, as brush painters, they could draw inspiration effectively from poetry written in English and/or poetry translated into English, so as to increase their personal capacity for artistic self-expression and intercultural communication through Chinese-style brush painting.