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Hundreds of propitious images in Chinese culture have been systematically identified, yet much of the less visible, negative imagery remains to be catalogued. "Negative imagery" can be understood to include inauspicious portents, bad omens and curses as well as the kinds of visual evocations of complaints, sorrow, pathos, and frustration that appear in paintings of the educated elite. 1 Did educated men of imperial China create obscure imagery to demonstrate erudition, or for pleasure, or personal security, or for all of these reasons ? Whatever their motivations, this essay speculates on the nature of the relationship between the clear and obscure poles of expression. One reason for the discrepancy in identifying various kinds of imagery is the relative difficulty of decoding. The 20th century efforts to catalogue positive images indicate that even those were not universally accessible. In 1920s Tianjin, assembling lucky images was an avocation of Japanese businessman Nozaki Nobuchika, who in 1928 published in Japanese the stilluseful reference Kisshô zuan kaidai (Explication of Auspicious Designs: A Study of Chinese Customs). 2 He was followed by the British scholar C.A.S. Williams, whose Outlines of Chinese Symbolism and Art Motives was completed in 1932, published in 1941, and republished in a third revised edition in 1976. 3 The publication of the Chinese translation of Nozaki's Explication of Auspicious Designs in 1980 contributed to studies both in the West and in Asia. As Terese Tse Bartholomew notes in the introduction to her book Hidden Meanings in Chinese Art, in the wake of the Chinese edition of Nozaki, over thirty books were published in Taiwan, China, and the West on various aspects of auspicious motifs. 4 One of those was Wolfram Eberhard's The Symbolic Language of the Chinese: Hidden Symbols in Chinese Life and Thought. 5 The "hidden symbols" and "hidden meanings" in the book titles by Eberhard and Bartholomew affirm that, to varying degrees, auspicious designs are characterized by culturally

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