| Abstract |
There is a calligraphy work “Record of the Pavilion of the Old Drunkard in Small Regular Script” signed by Wen Zhengming in Taipei Palace Museum, and it has always been regarded as one of his best masterpieces. However, in 1996, Zhou Daozhen, a research scholar who deeply studied in Wen Zhengming, pointed out many doubts in terms of many aspects like the postscript and expression, and even questioned the authenticity of the piece. In 2009, Zhang Hui analyzed the handwriting and found the overall writing habits quite different from Wen’s, and inferred it to be a counterfeit work. This article is in favor of Zhou and Zhang’s opinions. Besides their views, I discovered that there are many typos and reversed words in this work resulting in wrong meanings and allusions. It displays the copyist had problem understanding this classic article. Contrary to another work “Record of the Pavilion of the Old Drunkard in Large Running Script” with less mistake also signed by Wen Zhengming, the copyists’s literary extents are totally different. To sum up, I assume that “ Record of the Pavilion of the Old Drunkard in Small Regular Script” is not written by Wen Zhengming in higher possibility. If it is regarded as Wen’s authentic work, it must not be viewed as his representative masterpiece, because it is a reading record full of mistakes that making shame on the copyist. |
