EP3｜看见迹象：伊斯兰美术的转译与本土化 Seeing the Signs: Translation and Localization in Islamic Art

 

EP2｜看见迹象：伊斯兰美术的转译与本土化 Seeing the Signs: Translation and Localization in Islamic Art

 

EP1｜看见迹象：伊斯兰美术的转译与本土化 Seeing the Signs: Translation and Localization in Islamic Art

 

陆续分享我 8 月 28 号在亚洲文明博物馆导览的伊斯兰美术文物

请参看我在《联合早报》的专栏文章

走进敦煌莫高窟第249窟的视觉宇宙 Inside Mogao Cave 249, the Visual Universe of Dunhuang

 

走进莫高窟第249窟，看西王母、东王公、阿修罗与西魏敦煌如何共同构成一个跨文化的视觉宇宙。

Step inside Mogao Cave 249 and explore a Western Wei visual universe where Buddhist imagery, Chinese deities, mythical beings, and Silk Road cultures meet.

诗会在墙上 A Poetry Gathering on the Wall

 

在亚洲文明博物馆为文图学会会员导览《汇流：卢浮宫的莫卧儿、萨法维与奥斯曼艺术珍品》展览之前，我在每个人的手心轻轻喷了一点玫瑰露。

当时没有多作解释，只觉得这样走进展厅，似乎多了一点仪式感。后来才说明，这个动作其实来自我准备导览时，对一面十七世纪萨法维王朝诗会瓷板的反复观看。

祥云飘荡，花团锦簇，两位相对跪坐的年轻诗人，面貌清秀，头戴包裹式头巾，衣袍上缀满了花朵纹饰。其中一人身体略向前倾，抬手作吟诵或辩说的姿势，神情专注，像正在念出自己的诗句；另一人则低头执笔，把诗句写入狭长的 safīna 诗文册中。两人的旁边各有侍从，一位叉手而立；一位捧着有盖的食器，整体表现出从容而优雅的诗歌交流。虽然博物馆解释这是一场诗歌竞赛（Poetry Contest），我想到“以诗会友”，称它为《诗会图》瓷板。

Safīna和有盖的食器在展场里都能见到实物。我后来被画面里的瓶子吸引。那是一种鼓腹、细长颈、小口的器物。再看亚洲文明博物馆另一处展柜，我发现几件中国制造、外销海外的银器，器形十分相近，馆方明确标示为 rosewater sprinklers，玫瑰露洒水瓶。再查大都会艺术博物馆、英国维多利亚与艾伯特博物馆收藏的萨法维人物瓷板，也看到了相似的长颈瓶。

我当然无法证明诗会图中那只瓶子盛的就是玫瑰露。可是，萨法维时期的伊朗确实使用这类长颈洒水器来盛放芳香水；后来印度宫廷所用的 gulabpash 玫瑰露洒水器，也延续了这种细长颈、鼓腹的形式。于是，那些原先只是画面中物件的小器物，以及整面瓷板令我流连忘返。

它原来并不是一张挂在墙上的画。

它就是墙。

艺术史学者 Farshid Emami 根据宫廷史料、旅行记、十九世纪照片和收藏记录，把相关人物瓷板，重新放回伊斯法罕一座已经拆毁的皇家亭阁 Jahan-nama Pavilion。换句话说，我们今天在博物馆里看到的，其实是一座消失建筑留下来的残片。

十七世纪走进这座亭阁的人，他们可能坐在廊下，身边有食物，有花木，有谈笑，也有诗歌。墙上的人物与现实中的人物彼此映照，画里的花园与建筑外的花园互相延伸。诗歌在这里并不只是写在纸上的文字，而是进入建筑、进入日常生活的一种环境。

中国的雅集图比如《兰亭修禊图》《西园雅集图》，描绘文人在山水或园林中赋诗宴饮。中国文人把雅集画成长卷，萨法维王朝却把诗会烧成瓷砖，镶进建筑。两种文明选择的媒介不同，却都把“理想的生活”变成可以观看的图像。

而萨法维的诗会墙面，又比一幅可以收起的长卷更进一步。它不会等你打开，而是一直在那里。人走进建筑，就走进图像；坐下来，也坐进诗会的世界。

如果从建筑文图学来看，这面墙保存的并不只是文学题材。人物、文字、花园、器物、饮食、建筑位置与观看方式，共同构成意义。甚至那些我们今天已经无法确定用途的细颈瓶，也提醒我：一个空间的经验，从来不只属于眼睛。

所以，那天导览开始以前，我在每个人的手心喷了一点玫瑰露。

我并不是想复原一个已经无法证明的萨法维仪式。那一点香气，只是想补上一种今天的博物馆难保存的东西：嗅觉。

也许四百年前的诗会究竟是什么气味，我们永远不会知道。但至少这一面墙提醒我，文学曾经不只被阅读，也曾经被写下、被吟诵、被观看，并且生活在建筑空间。

诗会在墙上。

也曾经，在人的身体之间，在花园里，在空气中。

 

2026年9月26日，新加坡《联合早报》“上善若水”专栏

 

A Poetry Gathering on the Wall
I Lo-fen

Before leading members of the Text and Image Studies Society on a guided tour of Crosscurrents: Masterpieces of the Mughal, Safavid and Ottoman Arts from the Louvre at the Asian Civilisations Museum, I lightly sprinkled a little rosewater into each person’s palm.

At the time, I offered no particular explanation. I simply felt that entering the gallery in this way lent the occasion a certain sense of ritual. Only later did I realize that the gesture had grown out of my repeated contemplation, while preparing for the tour, of a seventeenth-century Safavid tile panel depicting a poetry gathering.

Auspicious clouds drift across the scene amid luxuriant blossoms. Two young poets kneel facing each other. Both have delicate features, wear wrapped turbans, and are dressed in robes covered with floral motifs. One leans slightly forward, raising a hand as if reciting or debating, his expression intent, as though he were speaking his own verse aloud. The other lowers his head and writes, recording the lines in a narrow safīna, a manuscript anthology of poetry. Each poet is accompanied by an attendant: one stands respectfully with hands clasped before him, while the other holds a covered food vessel. The overall impression is one of poised and elegant poetic exchange. Although the museum identifies the scene as a “Poetry Contest,” I am reminded instead of the Chinese expression “making friends through poetry,” and have come to think of it as a tile panel of a “poetry gathering.”

Actual examples of both the safīna and covered food vessels can be seen elsewhere in the exhibition. Yet it was the bottles in the image that eventually caught my attention. They have swollen bodies, long slender necks, and small mouths. Looking again at another display case in the Asian Civilisations Museum, I noticed several pieces of Chinese silverware made for export overseas whose forms were remarkably similar. The museum explicitly identifies them as rosewater sprinklers. When I subsequently examined Safavid figural tile panels in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum, I encountered comparable long-necked bottles there as well.

I cannot, of course, prove that the bottle in the poetry-gathering scene actually contained rosewater. Yet long-necked sprinklers of this kind were indeed used in Safavid Iran for scented waters, while the gulabpash rosewater sprinklers later used at Indian courts continued the same basic form of a bulbous body and slender neck. Objects that had initially seemed merely incidental within the composition thus began to hold my attention, as did the entire tiled wall.

It was never simply a painting hung on a wall.

It was the wall itself.

Drawing on court records, travel accounts, nineteenth-century photographs, and collecting histories, the art historian Farshid Emami has reconstructed the original architectural setting of related figural tile panels in the now-demolished Jahan-nama Pavilion in Isfahan. In other words, what we encounter in museums today are fragments surviving from a vanished building.

Those who entered the pavilion in the seventeenth century may have sat beneath its verandas, surrounded by food, flowering plants, conversation, laughter, and poetry. The figures on the wall echoed the people inhabiting the actual space; the painted garden extended into the garden beyond the architecture. Poetry here was more than words written on paper. It became part of an environment embedded in architecture and everyday life.

Chinese images of literati gatherings, such as the Orchid Pavilion Gathering and the Elegant Gathering in the Western Garden, likewise portray scholars composing poetry, feasting, and socializing amid landscapes or gardens. Chinese literati transformed such gatherings into handscrolls; the Safavids fired poetry gatherings onto ceramic tiles and set them into architecture. The two cultures chose different media, yet both transformed an “ideal way of life” into images that could be seen.

The Safavid tiled wall went even further than a handscroll, which could be rolled up and put away. It did not wait to be opened. It remained permanently present. To enter the building was to enter the image; to sit down was to sit within the world of the poetry gathering.

Seen from the perspective of Architectural Text and Image Studies, what this wall preserves is far more than a literary subject. Figures, writing, gardens, objects, food, architectural placement, and modes of viewing all work together to produce meaning. Even those long-necked bottles whose precise function we can no longer determine remind me that the experience of a space never belongs to the eyes alone.

That is why, before the tour began that day, I sprinkled a little rosewater into everyone’s palm.

I was not attempting to recreate a Safavid ritual that can no longer be proven. The faint fragrance was simply an attempt to restore, however briefly, something that museums find difficult to preserve: the sense of smell.

We may never know what a poetry gathering smelled like four hundred years ago. Yet this wall reminds me that literature was once more than something to be read. It was also written, recited, seen, and lived within architectural space.

The poetry gathering was on the wall.

And once, perhaps, it was also between human bodies, in the garden, and in the air.

Published in the “Shang Shan Ruo Shui” column, Lianhe Zaobao, Singapore, 26 September 2026.

 

看见迹象 Seeing Signs

 

少焉，月出于富丽敦酒店（ Fullerton Hotel）之上，徘徊于新加坡河天之间。

走出新加坡亚洲文明博物馆，清风徐来，暑气未消。本来热闹喧腾的室外灯光秀已经结束。抬眼望见左前方天上一轮明月，想起今天是农历七月十六日，正是苏东坡《赤壁赋》里写的“七月既望”啊。

准备了两个月，多方研究，今天终于交出还算满意的成绩单，完成导览《汇流：卢浮宫的莫卧儿、萨法维与奥斯曼艺术珍品》展览。我把这场九十分钟的导览题名为“看见迹象：伊斯兰美术的转译与本土化”。

“迹象”的概念来自《古兰经》第41章第53节：“我将把我的种种迹象显示在四方，并显示在他们自身中，直到他们明白这是真理。”阿拉伯语 āyah（复数 āyāt）既指天地与生命中可供辨识的“迹象”，也用来称《古兰经》的经文。

“迹象”和文图学讲的文本（Text）在观看方法上相通，但目的略有出入。日月星辰运行和人的自身，都是真主的迹象，引导人明瞭创造的秩序与启示的真理——“迹象”召唤人们去体察世界。“文本”则是意义生成、转译与理解的场域。万物皆文本，文字、图像、器物、声音、气味、身体、空间和光线，通过媒介、历史、文化语境与观看者相互联系，观点也随时间、地点和解读方式发生变化。文图学由此追问：意义怎样形成？怎样传播？怎样被转译？又怎样在不同地方获得新的生命？

导览伊始，我朝文图学会会员听众们的手心逐一喷洒液体，有人搓了搓，马上闻出：这是玫瑰露。是的，展品中有物件图像，是和玫瑰露有关。

虽然导览的主题集中于历史学家形容的三大“火药帝国”（Gunpowder Empires），时代在公元16-18世纪，不过，这些文明区域早在7世纪，甚至更早，就和中国有商贸和文化往来，“物证”就是亚洲文明博物馆展示的黑石号沉船出水文物。我带着大家浏览了河南巩县的唐代青花盘、巨型执壶，留下视觉印象。随后，我们看见在印度莫卧儿帝国的珍珠贝母执壶盘组合，以及类似造型的金属执壶盘组合，可知器型的延续关系。

景德镇的青花瓷出口到萨法维帝国（今伊朗），深受喜爱，中国的吉祥瑞兽例如麒麟也传播到异域，出现了外观类似，内里别样的新形式。这种承接和转换在文化交流，尤其是文物艺术品的模仿制作过程中，屡见不鲜。我找了明代的麒麟纹盘和现场类似的展品对照，大家会心一笑，频频点头说：有趣！

这两个相隔两百年的麒麟纹盘属于同一套视觉语法：青白色彩、同心圆构图、中央瑞兽和外围缠枝花卉。明代的牡丹缠枝石草图像比伊朗的放射状如菊花和丰肥的叶片细致具体；盘中央的明代麒麟是独角、龙首、鳞身，被火焰围绕，仿佛奔腾着向祥云昂首回颈。没有看展签之前，我还以为伊朗的这件蓝地留白大盘画的是狮子呢，可爱！

看展的乐趣之一，是亲眼认识或发现微妙的细节。曾经听连文思老师介绍过刻有波斯诗句的烛台，听她娓娓道来，十分感动。我端详那些貌似花纹的古波斯文字，注意到不只顶端有，底座也有，顶端的文字是诗句；底座则是拥有者的题记。我把诗句翻译成：

我的心因爱恋美人而燃烧，肝肠如焚；
爱情每一刻，又以新的烙印灼烧着我。
我与烛火相对，恰如飞蛾；
若再向前一步，我的双翼便会燃烧。

好奇这样的诗句，如果搭配音乐和波斯语，听起来是怎样的感觉呢？于是我借用 AI语音，录制波斯语朗读，配上伊朗音乐家凯汉·卡尔霍尔（Kayhan Kalhor）演奏的卡曼切琴（kamancheh）。琴声低回悠远，诗句沿着器身周旋，热烈的爱火点亮了烛台。

导览最后，来到奥斯曼咖啡馆的图像和杯盘。我播放了土耳其音乐家库德西·埃尔居内尔（Kudsi Ergüner）演奏的古典音乐。那幽幽的内伊笛（ney），穿越咖啡馆里读诗、下棋的人们，满是生活的迹象。

 

2026年9月12日，新加坡《联合早报》“上善若水”专栏

 

Seeing Signs

I Lo-fen

Before long, the moon rose above the Fullerton Hotel and lingered between the sky and the Singapore River.

As I walked out of the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore, a gentle breeze began to blow, though the heat of the day had not yet faded. The lively outdoor light show had already ended. Looking up, I saw a bright full moon hanging in the sky to my left. Then I remembered that it was the sixteenth day of the seventh lunar month—the very “day after the full moon in the seventh month” described by Su Shi in his Former Ode on the Red Cliffs.

After two months of preparation and research from many different angles, I finally felt that I had produced a reasonably satisfying result today, completing my guided tour of the exhibition Crosscurrents: Masterpieces of Mughal, Safavid and Ottoman Art from the Musée du Louvre. I entitled this ninety-minute tour “Seeing Signs: Translation and Localisation in Islamic Art.”

The concept of “signs” comes from verse 53 of Chapter 41 of the Quran: “We shall show them Our signs in the horizons and within themselves until it becomes clear to them that it is the truth.” The Arabic word āyah (plural āyāt) refers both to “signs” in the heavens, the earth, and living beings that invite recognition, and to individual verses of the Quran.

As a mode of seeing, the idea of “signs” has much in common with the concept of “text” in Text and Image Studies, although their purposes differ somewhat. The movements of the sun, moon, and stars, as well as the human self, are all signs of God, guiding people toward an understanding of the order of creation and the truth of revelation. “Signs” call upon us to observe and contemplate the world. “Text,” by contrast, is a site where meaning is generated, translated, and interpreted. Everything can be read as text: words, images, objects, sounds, smells, bodies, spaces, and light are interconnected through media, history, cultural context, and the viewer, while perspectives change with time, place, and modes of interpretation. Text and Image Studies therefore asks: How is meaning formed? How is it transmitted? How is it translated? And how does it acquire new life in different places?

At the beginning of the tour, I sprayed a liquid into the palms of the members of the Text and Image Studies Society who had joined me. Some rubbed their hands together and immediately recognised the fragrance: rosewater. Yes—among the objects and images in the exhibition were works associated with rosewater.

Although the tour focused on what historians have called the three great “Gunpowder Empires,” mainly from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, these regions had already maintained commercial and cultural contacts with China by the seventh century, and even earlier. The material evidence can be found in the objects recovered from the Tang Shipwreck displayed at the Asian Civilisations Museum. I first led the group past Tang-dynasty blue-and-white dishes from the Gongxian kilns in Henan and a monumental ewer, leaving them with a visual impression. We then encountered a Mughal ewer-and-basin set made of mother-of-pearl, as well as a metal ewer-and-basin set of similar form, allowing us to see how vessel types continued across regions and periods.

Blue-and-white porcelain from Jingdezhen was exported to the Safavid Empire, in present-day Iran, where it was greatly admired. Auspicious Chinese creatures such as the qilin also travelled abroad, giving rise to new forms that looked familiar on the surface yet were transformed within. Such processes of inheritance and adaptation are frequently encountered in cultural exchange, especially in the imitation and remaking of works of art and material culture. I found a Ming-dynasty dish decorated with a qilin and compared it with a similar object in the exhibition. Everyone smiled knowingly and nodded repeatedly: “Interesting!”

The two qilin dishes, made two centuries apart, belong to the same visual grammar: a blue-and-white palette, concentric composition, an auspicious beast at the centre, and scrolling floral ornament around the rim. The Ming-dynasty dish renders peonies, scrolling stems, and rocks with greater specificity and delicacy than the Iranian work, whose ornament is more radial, with chrysanthemum-like blossoms and fuller leaves. At the centre of the Ming dish, the qilin has a single horn, a dragon-like head, and a scaled body surrounded by flames. It appears to be galloping forward while turning its head upward toward the auspicious clouds. Before reading the label, I had thought the large Iranian dish, with its reserve decoration against a blue ground, depicted a lion. How charming!

One of the pleasures of visiting an exhibition is being able to recognise or discover subtle details with one’s own eyes. I had once listened to Dr Lien Wen Sze introduce a candlestick inscribed with Persian poetry, and I was deeply moved by the way she unfolded its story. As I examined what at first looked like decorative patterns, I realised that the Persian inscriptions appeared not only at the top but also around the base. The upper inscription consists of poetry, while the lower one records an owner’s inscription.

I translated the poem as follows:

My heart burns with love for the beloved; my very entrails are aflame.

At every moment, love sears me again with a fresh brand.

I face the candle flame like a moth;

one step closer, and my wings will burn.

I became curious: what would these lines sound like in Persian, accompanied by music? So I used an AI voice to create a Persian recitation and paired it with Iranian musician Kayhan Kalhor playing the kamancheh. The instrument’s low, lingering sound seemed to circle around the candlestick together with the verses, while the ardour of love itself appeared to ignite the flame. Kalhor is internationally known as a virtuoso of the kamancheh, the Persian spike fiddle.

At the end of the tour, we arrived at images and tableware associated with an Ottoman coffeehouse. I played classical music performed by Turkish musician Kudsi Ergüner. The haunting sound of the ney seemed to pass through the figures in the coffeehouse as they recited poetry and played chess, filling the scene with the signs of everyday life.

12 September 2026, “Shang Shan Ruo Shui” column, Lianhe Zaobao, Singapore.