Couplet in running script

Ten meters around, dragon bamboo stands taller than the trees,
In five colors each, sacred mushrooms blossom as big as a fist.

Jiang Ren was a native of Renhe (modern Hangzhou), Zhejiang Province. A landscape painter, poet, and calligrapher, he is included for his seal carving among the Eight Masters of Xiling. Although praised by some contemporaries as the best seal carver of his generation and recommended on at least one occasion for an official position, he contrived to avoid any political entanglements, choosing instead to live quietly in a small rundown house outside the city. Jiang was solitary and taciturn by nature and kept aloof from society throughout his life.

As a calligrapher, Jiang Ren worked primarily in the orthodox styles of the model-book tradition, and while he sometimes wrote in clerical script, he is most highly regarded for his standard script and running script, as here. In his running script, Jiang typically blended thick, dark horizontal lines with thinner, less pronounced vertical strokes, using these variations to pattern and texture his overall composition. Jiang's output was rather small and surviving works are comparatively few, while dated scrolls such as this couplet are even rarer still.

This work is dedicated to an unidentified individual, evidently one of Jiang Ren's uncles, who was a poet and used the sobriquet Yipu (Gardener). Jiang presumably intended the two lines of the couplet to praise his uncle as an exceptional gardener capable of cultivating even such special plants as the "dragon bamboo" and sacred mushroom, a kind of fungus reputed to confer long life when ingested.