A Brief Analysis of the Artistic Value of Dongba Scriptures and Zhang Yunling's Modern Dongba Paintings
This article examines the artistic value of Dongba scriptures, the pictographic religious texts of the Naxi people of Lijiang. Known as "Ssee Ggee Lv Ggee" (traces of wood and stone), Naxi pictographs form vivid, painting-like characters created through methods such as pictorial representation, association, and phonetic borrowing, and were used to record Dongba religious scriptures from at least the 11th century onward. Though rooted in animistic, polytheistic Dongba religion and its worship of nature, the scriptures—when stripped of religious content—reveal strong aesthetic qualities in composition, line, and color. They also preserve Naxi ancestors' social life, labor, love, and courage in literary form, embodying national spirit and emotion directly through character shapes. The author praises the scriptures' bold, varied brushwork—executed with bamboo pens and homemade ink on local paper—as a unique "melody of lines," unmatched by any other script.
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