About the author
Jiang Ji's life is sparsely documented in publicly available sources: neither his dates, his native place, nor his nationality are clearly recorded. What can be established is that he wrote a single work, The Secret Essentials of Capturing Spirit (Chuan Shen Mi Yao), which is classified as literature appreciation. Judging from its title and transmitted content, the book discusses methods of conveying the spirit in figure portrayal, covering such essentials as observing a person's appearance, grasping expression and temperament, and how to set brush to paper in rendering them. It belongs to the tradition of Chinese theories of portraiture and figure painting. Works of this kind tend not to indulge in vague generalities but concentrate on distilling and passing on concrete experience, in concise language and clear order, so that later students may study and apply them. Although Jiang Ji himself is little known and records about him are scarce, The Secret Essentials of Capturing Spirit provides valuable textual evidence for the study of ancient figure-painting techniques and aesthetic ideas, and has its own place in painting theory and connoisseurship; readers today can still sense from it the traditional emphasis on capturing inner spirit.