TShen
Plus ça Change – Caveat Emptor
I am writing this to give potential purchasers of this book a heads-up, so you have a better idea of what you’re buying. I imagine that many of you will be looking at this edition primarily because, like me, you are a huge fan of Tsai Chih-Chung’s other work. After all, at the time of writing, Amazon lists 360 other English language paperbacks that are translations of, or guides to the Yi Jing meaning we’re fairly spoilt for choice when it comes to non-illustrated translations of this book. My copy arrived this morning and I felt quite underwhelmed and even slightly disappointed when I was first flicking through it. Tsai’s previous work has always, at least to my mind, been marked by the energy of his artwork and its cohesiveness to the text. What’s presented in this latest book appears more like a random collection of images and, as I was scanning through, I started to notice things. Firstly, images are repeated throughout the book and this happens on numerous occasions. I don’t have the time or inclination to do a forensic analysis of the whole work, but here are some examples: • The same cart and horses appear on pages 50 and 196. • There’s an image of an arc of the world with a mountain, an elephant and other animals that appears on pages 7 and 214. • The same pheasant eating a worm appears on pages 242 and 267. • The same ox with a rug on its back appears on pages 148 and 298 • The same tiger appears on pages 16, 96, and 294 Then I started to get this nagging feeling that some of the illustrations felt very familiar, like the aforementioned tiger. Given that Tsai has used Confucius as his narrator for the Yi Jing, I dug out my 1996 edition of Confucius Speaks made a quick comparison. I found the following images that appear to be reused in the new book, although all have been flipped on their vertical axis before being colored in. • On page 25 of Confucius Speaks there’s an image of a young Confucious marrying a woman from Song of the surname Bingguan. It appea