Wen C. Fong is professor emeritus of Chinese art history at Princeton University, where he taught from 1954 to 1999, established the country's first PhD program in Chinese and Japanese art and archaeology, and served for many years as faculty curator of Asian art at the Princeton University Art Museum. He also served as consultative chairman of the Department of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for three decades before retiring in 2000. His many books include "Images of the Mind", "Beyond Representation", and "Possessing the Past".

This book presents a survey of Chinese painting from the eighth to the 14th century, a period during which the nature of China's pictorial art changed dramatically. Illustrated by works in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the author begins by describing the advent toward the end of the Bronze Age of figural representation in Chinese art, and next traces the development of Chinese landscape painting from the third to the tenth century. He then moves on to discuss the art of the Sung dynasty, when the imperial government was increasingly absolute and repressive. In this period artists shifted from a realistic rendition of nature to more symbolic representation of single flowers, rocks and trees. By the time of the Yuan dynasty, following the Mongol conquest of 1279, objective representation in art had been replaced by imagery that drew on the artist's inner response to his world. Because it was believed that the meaning of a painted subject, made complex by personal and symbolic associations, could no longer be expressed without language, the painter began to inscribe poems and incorporate calligraphy in his works, the multiple relationships among word, image and calligraphy forming the basis of a new art. At this stage Chinese art entered its richest and most diverse stage f development.