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Xuanhe Catalogue of Paintings is the first complete translation of the well-known document produced at the court of Emperor Huizong (r. 1100–1125). Dated to 1120, the Catalogue is divided into ten categories of subject matter. Under Daoist and Buddhist Subjects, Figural Subjects, Architecture, Barbarian Tribes, Dragons and Fish, Landscape, Domestic and Wild Animals, Flowers and Birds, Ink Bamboo, and Vegetables and Fruit are biographies of 231 painters, ranging from famous early masters, such as Wu Daozi (ca. 685-758) and Li Cheng (919-967), to otherwise unknown artists of the Song-dynasty court, including fourteen eunuch officials and sixteen male and female members of the royal family. Titles of their pictures held in the palace collection are listed for each artist. These 6,396 paintings testify to the visual culture experienced by viewers of the twelfth century. The author's Introduction analyzes the Catalogue as a source of evidence about the formation of the Song-dynasty palace collection and argues that the majority of its pictures were already in the collection before Huizong's reign, as a result of conquest, confiscation, tribute, gift culture, collecting by earlier emperors, and the production of academy artists and regular officials at the Song court. Under Huizong's reign, around a thousand other pictures were added to the Catalogue through acquisition and reattribution.Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The International Conference on Life System Modeling and Simulation (LSMS) was formed to bring together international researchers and practitioners in the field of life system modeling and simulation as well as life system-inspired theory and methodology. The concept of a life system is quite broad. It covers both micro and macro c- ponents ranging from cells, tissues and organs across to organisms and ecologic niches. These interact and evolve to produce an overall complex system whose beh- ior is difficult to comprehend and predict. The arrival of the 21st century has been marked by a resurgence of research interest both in arriving at a systems-level und- standing of biology and in applying such knowledge in complex real-world appli- tions. Consequently, computational methods and intelligence in systems, biology, as well as bio-inspired computational intelligence, have emerged as key drivers for new computational methods. For this reason papers dealing with theory, techniques and real-world applications relating to these two themes were especially solicited. Building on the success of a previous workshop in 2004, the 2007 International Conference on Life System Modeling and Simulation (LSMS 2007) was held in Shanghai, China, September 14–17, 2007. The conference was jointly organized by The Shanghai University, Queen's University Belfast together with The Life System Modeling and Simulation Special Interest Committee of the Chinese Association for System Simulation.