In this series of lectures on the painters Hsia Kuei (twelfth-thirteenth centuries), Shen Chou (fifteenth-sixteenth centuries), and Shih-t'ao (seventeenth-eighteenth centuries), Richard Edwards explores the special relationship between the self and landscape in Chinese art. These three painters, each important in his own time and deemed a master by later critics, were all concerned with the subjective in the objective world. In Chinese painting there is no clear desire to separate these two realms; rather, there is a constant, conscious (...) play between the physical reality of the world and the subjective vision of the artist. The artist is continually imitating the world--sometimes more, sometimes less--but he never denies its appearance to the point of total abstraction; nor, in the other extreme, does he claim for the physical world an existence independent of his own involvement. Richard Edwards is Professor Emeritus of East Asian Art and Art History, University of Michigan. (shrink)

This article deals with the Chinese ink painting tradition, as a paradigm in which art and life are coupled and intertwined. In fact, in Chinese classical aesthetics, art and life do not produce a dramatic tension, but are inscribed in a common process of naturalness or spontaneity. The painter has to learn how the breath, or vital energy, that flows in every single image-phenomenon, can be enlivened by the brush strokes. Moreover, the paper builds a dialogue between the (...) European and the Chinese main patterns. Showing alternately the continuity or the discontinuity between art and life, both traditions of thought display the possibility to learn a sort of “art of living”, through – and not despite – the dynamic de-coincidence that appears in the folds of human experience. (shrink)

Chinese painting has always been a unique product of our ancient civilization, which has survived to the present day. During its 2000-year development, Chinese painting has gradually turned into a unique and non-reproducible art form capable of expressing the thoughts and feelings of the artist. Over time, Chinese painting also demonstrates a new trend of inheritance and innovative development. Changes in Chinese painting occur simultaneously with the processes of globalization. This gives rise to new research on (...) the trends of diversification of artistic creativity. The focus of artistic expression has shifted from the depiction of direct natural objects towards the spiritual plane, which is a direct result of the creative activity of artists whose aspirations are manifested in the use of traditional Chinese ink painting in combination with new methods of figurative representation and deep understanding of spiritual content. Since ancient times, artists have actively sought to harmonize and balance the subjective and objective, as well as to achieve their organic combination. This article examines traditional Chinese painting as a source and driving force of the transformation of Chinese painting、prints of the era and integration in the content of paintings、attempts to introduce the Western concept of frontal composition, as well as updating the language of painting and artistic concepts. It is argued that the fundamental driving force and the main support for the development of Chinese painting in the context of globalization should be traditions integrated with new creative elements and techniques, thus it is possible to better promote Chinese culture and inherit the essence of traditional Chinese painting. (shrink)

. As a discipline, semiotics has gained recognition in many fields. Cultural background plays an important part in the field of the visual art. Given the rich cultural context of the pictorial hybridization Chinese-European in the early Qing dynasty, the pictorial works can be used in studying semiotics. This article addresses a discourse on some semiotic reflections in painting. It focuses on the application of the theory of the semiotic scientist Charles Peirce that has proven to be suitable for (...) analyzing pictorial works. The model chosen as a subject for investigation is a painting in ink on silk titled “Portrait of Qianlong’s Consort with Yongyan as a Child,” painted using Western techniques in the eighteenth century. The analysis of the portrait offers an appropriate basis to develop some semiotic reflections on this work of art by contributing to aesthetic and artistic awareness. Semiotic structures were employed to develop an understanding of the pictorial forms by turning each element into a tool of communication. The semiotic reading of this work is concerned with the visual art education and sensorial message of the painting. (shrink)

Having reached its zenith in the Song dynasty, Chinese landscape painting in the dynasties that followed became highly formulaic as artists simply copied the old masters to perfect their skills. This orthodox approach was not accepted by everyone however; some painters criticized it, arguing it was better to learn the ideas behind the techniques of the old masters than to blindly copy them. Shitao was one such critic and his Manual on Painting exemplifies his desire to disassociate himself from (...) the classical approach to painting. This paper will investigate the three major themes of Shitao’s text—the holistic brushstroke, brush and ink, and the method of no-method—in order to show how they shaped his view of landscape painting and how said paintings subsequently embodied them. Unlike the near-scientific approach taken by his contemporaries and predecessors, Shitao paints to capture the unifying simplicity of nature, an onto-aesthetic experience that is profoundly enlightening. (shrink)

This essay aims at an elucidation of the performative relation connecting artistic mimesis with the living body. Encompassing art theory and phenomenology of the body, the scope is to evince a crucial link between aesthetic interpretation, body motion, and mimetic creativity, with general implications for reflection on the body, as well as a deeper understanding of a major element of ancient Chinese culture. By mainly analyzing Chinese texts on ink brush writing, as well as some testimony taken from (...) 20th century European philosophy, this essay, from a transcultural stance, tries to show how ink brush writing may be interpreted as a type of regulated body movement and body exercise. What appears as responsiveness within this phenomenal field is a specific form of mimesis, namely body mimesis. As a sort of imitative action, body mimesis runs through the bodily self, beyond consciousness, transforming it and shaping its behavior. (shrink)

In ‘Zones of Indeterminacy: Art, Body and Politics in Daoist Thought’, Peng Yu foregrounds the concept of Xu from Zhuangzi’s philosophical writings, and relates this to questions about the political body. Xu refers to a Daoist notion of ambiguity, though it remains unclear as to how to fully define the term. The article explores its meaning through reference to debates of the body, but also liubai painting, which refers to the idea of ‘leaving blankness’, associated with Chinese ink painting. (...) For Peng Yu, the notion of Xu can help us to consider a ‘politics of indeterminacy’ – a means of redefining the status of subject within power structures, or rather a radical re-articulation of how we refer to power relations in the first place. In this interview, with Sunil Manghani and Cheng-Chu Weng, Peng Yu outlines and elaborates upon the main themes of the article. (shrink)

In response to globalization, is there to be a single, homogeneous set of aesthetic values governing the production and consumption of art? I focus on a newcomer to globalized contemporary art, China, and argue that artworld art is far from the only art currently being produced. I describe four connected kinds of art currently made in China: Modernist, traditional, and avant-garde, which are artworld art, and mass commercial, which is not. Practices in all four conform to expectations globally that (...) class='Hi'>Chinese art of all kinds should exemplify imitation, emulation, and copying. Such conformity entails what Winnie Wong has termed ‘staging Chineseness’. I conclude with an examination of this process in two recent exhibitions before proposing that a proliferation of a variety of values is unavoidable while contemporary artworld practitioners continue to introduce local concerns, and while the self-claimed high status of artworld art is progressively challenged by the vitality worldwide of non-artworld art. While some of these values are resistant to Western globalizing homogenization, others conform to it. (shrink)

The article deals with Chinese ink painting and some aesthetic notions, in particular those of xiang 象 and shanshui 山水 (literally: “mountains-waters”, i.e. landscape...

In contemporary Chinese art the national traditions and modern trends of the art world are especially relevant. Since the 1980s, in the works of a number of authors, interest began to manifest itself in the techniques of silk work, which was characteristic of ancient and medieval painting on scrolls, which was later replaced by more accessible drawings on paper. At the present stage, such painting has reached its heyday and is highly appreciated in the art market. The most famous (...) masters engaged in silk painting are Mu Yilin and Dong Wenzheng. The analysis of their creations allows us to see how the artists discovered the expressive possibilities of this material, including its transparency, refraction, color and tone saturation. The object of attention is the Chinese tradition of painting on silk, and the subject is the features of its development at the beginning of the XXI century on the example of the work of famous artists and the options they take into account in the compositions of techniques, figurative structure and expressive means of the old masters. The purpose of the article is to identify the main themes and artistic means that modern artists use in their silk works, as well as the option of integrating an ethno-cultural component into their work. (shrink)

In this paper, we pose a speculative encounter between Heidegger and the Chinese Song Dynasty landscape painter Xia Gui. Our intention is to reassess Heidegger’s theory of the fourfold. By placing the concept in a cross-cultural context, we argue that Heidegger was essentially correct in that the world is structured as a fold between interrelated elements. At the same time, we challenge the quantity and quality of the folded elements. If one turns to the work of Xia Gui in (...) conjunction with relevant Daoist texts, what one finds is a threefold structure to the world, composed of earth, sky, and mortals without Heidegger’s emphasis on divinities. In conclusion, we suggest that studying the folding structure of the world ought to be done through cultural comparisons of philosophical and aesthetic traditions in order to understand the potentiality for worldhood as an xfold. (shrink)

At times making the right life-choices can feel like an overwhelming pressure. In this delightful book, a wise Master leads a young pupil on a journey through China, dispensing wisdom & sound advice at every turn. The pupil gains experience of life's ups & downs, & eventually achieves fulfillment. Chao-Hsiu Chen's reflective account is a pleasure to read. You will quickly associate with the lessons for life learned by the pupil, & enjoy the glimpses of everyday rural China revealed along (...) the way. This beautiful & inspirational book is illustrated throughout with Chen's sublime ink paintings, which perfectly complement her text. Translated from the Chinese. (shrink)

I propose for emotion research a dynamic approach to truth in which folk theories, no matter how much they may be infested with magical thinking and peculiar beliefs, can function as potential competitors and valued interlocutors on the platform of theory construction. For demonstration, I present the ancient Chinese notion of ganlei as a counterpoint to Western metaphysics. Potential contributions of this indigenous belief system to theory and research on emotions include bringing greater clarity to existing concepts of empathy (...) and mind reading and participating meaningfully in the current debates on emotions. More important, ganlei suggests a shift of focus in emotion research from epistemological to ontological categories and from mental representations to intermental transactions. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

ABSTRACTWhen encountering something unfamiliar, it is natural to describe and understand it by reference to what is familiar. Commentary on Chinese landscape painting usually relies heavily upon analogies with Western art. James Elkins, concerned to understand the implications of this procedure, asks whether in seeing and writing about this art we ever can escape our Western perspectives. His problem is not just that he himself does not know Chinese. Even bilingual specialists or native Chinese speakers employ this (...) vocabulary, for the vocabulary of contemporary art history, developed in the West, now is the language of academic art history everywhere. We know that we are distorting our descriptions of this Chinese art, even though we don't know how to “get it right.” In the history of European painting from Cimabue to the present, it would be hard to find any Western paintings that could be confused with any art made in China, so the frequent reliance of scholars upon such comparisons seems problematic. Of course, in the near future this situation might change. Perhaps in fifty years, as China becomes more prosperous, art history will become a hybrid discipline. At that point, the situation, which Elkins analyzes, will be reversed. But such a change is a long way in the future. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.1 (2003) 64-76 [Access article in PDF] The Sign System in Chinese Landscape Paintings Cliff G. Mcmahon Paintings emerge from a culture field and must be interpreted in relation to the net of culture. A given culture will be implicated by the sign system used by the painter. Everyone agrees that in Chinese landscape paintings, the most important cultural bond is to (...) ancient Chinese Taoism, and to a lesser degree, to Confucianism. Obviously, then, the key for these landscapes is an alert understanding of Taoism, and the primary source is the book the Tao Tê Ching.Some of the most crucial elements in Taoist beliefs are often ignored in the analysis of the Taoist landscapes, and this deserves more attention. The core of Taoism lies in a philosophic and religious guess, and the guess is made as an effort to reach a high-order explanatory theory of the origin of the universe, the structure of the universe, and the best path for human life. The guess of the ancient Chinese sages goes something like this: The universe is created by an Ultimate One whose nature remains mysterious, beyond the power of words, an Absolute pervaded by the spirit of motherhood, and thus moved to the acts of creation, using two agents of creation. These two agents are invisible but real forces that operate by the tension of polarity, the dynamic interplay of negative and positive energies, much like male and female forces. The female power is called Yin, the male power Yang. The female power is seen wherever there is fluidity, softness, openness, receiving, emptiness, or darkness. The male power is at work in hardness, assertiveness, force, and light. Everything that is made is a blending of the Yin and Yang polarities, and the dynamism and flux of reality is based on the tendency of Yin and Yang to advance and retreat, the tendency of one to become the other, just as summer changes into winter, and day changes into night. In order for a man to be complete, he must learn to put on the way of woman, to be receptive. This is a very intelligent principle. [End Page 64] When we take in all our impressions of nature, and take in all the books we have read, we are in the receptive mode. The Yin female principle of emptiness has a priority over Yang in that there must be an empty space before any concrete thing comes to occupy the space. The Yin female force is seen in the low and quiet valley, and in the fluid receptivity of water. Yang is in the bold assertive mountains and in the hardness of stone. Yin appears in the graceful and flexible bending of bamboo, while Yang is in the hardness and strength of bamboo. Since Yin is associated with water, all forms of cloud and mist are symbols of Yin. Yang is action, Yin is wisdom.One of the most important aspects of Taoism is the principle that the mysterious Absolute One has permeated all of reality and serves the good of all creatures in every passing minute, asking nothing in return and offering no favoritism to any age or any group. This is obviously a sophisticated and intelligent principle for a theology. On this point, Taoism is superior to Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Christianity might have taken a similar stand in that the gospel of John declares that the eternal logos dwells in all created things in a timeless manner, and was fully embedded in the world before the coming of the historical Jesus, but so far, Christians have almost totally ignored the opening lines of John.This philosophic core of Taoist belief compares to the great Western idea that Godhead creates by the use of cosmic agents. In the gospel of John, the logos is the agent. In chapter eight of Proverbs, Wisdom is the agent. In Plotinus, Nous is the agent. In Heraclitus, the polarities of love and hate are this agent. Sometimes the idea of cosmic agent is used to protect... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.1 (2003) 64-76 [Access article in PDF] The Sign System in Chinese Landscape Paintings Cliff G. Mcmahon Paintings emerge from a culture field and must be interpreted in relation to the net of culture. A given culture will be implicated by the sign system used by the painter. Everyone agrees that in Chinese landscape paintings, the most important cultural bond is to (...) ancient Chinese Taoism, and to a lesser degree, to Confucianism. Obviously, then, the key for these landscapes is an alert understanding of Taoism, and the primary source is the book the Tao Tê Ching.Some of the most crucial elements in Taoist beliefs are often ignored in the analysis of the Taoist landscapes, and this deserves more attention. The core of Taoism lies in a philosophic and religious guess, and the guess is made as an effort to reach a high-order explanatory theory of the origin of the universe, the structure of the universe, and the best path for human life. The guess of the ancient Chinese sages goes something like this: The universe is created by an Ultimate One whose nature remains mysterious, beyond the power of words, an Absolute pervaded by the spirit of motherhood, and thus moved to the acts of creation, using two agents of creation. These two agents are invisible but real forces that operate by the tension of polarity, the dynamic interplay of negative and positive energies, much like male and female forces. The female power is called Yin, the male power Yang. The female power is seen wherever there is fluidity, softness, openness, receiving, emptiness, or darkness. The male power is at work in hardness, assertiveness, force, and light. Everything that is made is a blending of the Yin and Yang polarities, and the dynamism and flux of reality is based on the tendency of Yin and Yang to advance and retreat, the tendency of one to become the other, just as summer changes into winter, and day changes into night. In order for a man to be complete, he must learn to put on the way of woman, to be receptive. This is a very intelligent principle. [End Page 64] When we take in all our impressions of nature, and take in all the books we have read, we are in the receptive mode. The Yin female principle of emptiness has a priority over Yang in that there must be an empty space before any concrete thing comes to occupy the space. The Yin female force is seen in the low and quiet valley, and in the fluid receptivity of water. Yang is in the bold assertive mountains and in the hardness of stone. Yin appears in the graceful and flexible bending of bamboo, while Yang is in the hardness and strength of bamboo. Since Yin is associated with water, all forms of cloud and mist are symbols of Yin. Yang is action, Yin is wisdom.One of the most important aspects of Taoism is the principle that the mysterious Absolute One has permeated all of reality and serves the good of all creatures in every passing minute, asking nothing in return and offering no favoritism to any age or any group. This is obviously a sophisticated and intelligent principle for a theology. On this point, Taoism is superior to Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Christianity might have taken a similar stand in that the gospel of John declares that the eternal logos dwells in all created things in a timeless manner, and was fully embedded in the world before the coming of the historical Jesus, but so far, Christians have almost totally ignored the opening lines of John.This philosophic core of Taoist belief compares to the great Western idea that Godhead creates by the use of cosmic agents. In the gospel of John, the logos is the agent. In chapter eight of Proverbs, Wisdom is the agent. In Plotinus, Nous is the agent. In Heraclitus, the polarities of love and hate are this agent. Sometimes the idea of cosmic agent is used to protect... (shrink)

‘Spirit consonance engendering a sense of life’ (Qi Yun Sheng Dong) as the first law of Chinese painting, originally proposed by Xie He (active 500–535?) in his six laws of painting, has been commonly echoed by numerous later Chinese artists up to this day. Tracing back the meaning of each character of ‘Qi Yun Sheng Dong’ from Pre-Qin up to the Six Dynasties, along with a comparative analysis on the renderings of ‘Qi Yun Sheng Dong’ by experts in (...) Western academia, I establish ‘spirit consonance’ as the rendering of ‘Qi Yun’. By examining texts on painting by significant critics in Chinese art history, and by referring to specific works by painters from the Six Dynasties up to the Yuan Dynasty, I present the merits and demerits of the different interpretations by Western experts, and explore the essence of ‘Qi Yun’. Once the painter successfully captures ‘spirit consonance’ as the essential character or ‘internal reality’ of the object, and transmits it into the work, ‘Qi Yun’ further implies the expressive quality of the work beyond formal representation. Additionally, the fusion of expressive and representative functions also leaves space for further explaining the aesthetic interaction among artist, object, work, and audience. From the Six Dynasties onwards, Chinese painters have practised the expressive pursuit beyond epresentation on the basis of the unification of ‘Qi Yun’ (spirit consonance) and formal representation, although spirit consonance was valued more highly than formal likeness. (shrink)

This paper considers Western approaches at different time periods to Chinese landscape painting, with a focus on the eleventh century Chinese painter Guo Xi’s Essay on landscape painting. First, brief information will be given about the artist and his work. A brief scrutiny of a review published in 1936 will show how the Essay became influential in the West. Later publications, which appeared in 1969, 2007, and 2009 respectively, will show some changes in Western approaches to Chinese (...) landscape painting, revealing the main rhetoric of their times along with changing debates and approaches within Western art history. (shrink)

According to Marxist philosophy, everything in the world is universally connected and in perpetual motion. Chinese society has gone through a long history of civilizational development. Since the modern era (1840-1919), great changes have taken place in the civilizational development of China. The transformation of social forms depends on the transformation of culture, and the approximation of culture to modernity is a prerequisite for the modernization of society. Thus, the development of society inevitably causes changes in art and culture; (...) and vice versa, the progress of art and culture, in turn, contributes to the progress of society. A clear and complex line has been traced in the development of Chinese painting over the centuries: from a high degree of integration to gradual differentiation leading to conflict, and then to integration. The development of Chinese painting as a whole shows a transformational trend from tradition to modernity, developing in a tortuous way. In this paper, a combination of research methods is used for research, mainly documentary research, descriptive research, comparative research and case study. Considering the features and trends of Chinese painting at different stages of development, we can more accurately judge the direction of development of modern Chinese painting and find ways to integrate tradition and modernity. (shrink)

Western philosophy has been defined through the exclusion of non-Western forms of thought as non-philo-sophical. In this paper, I place the notion of what is “properly” philosophy into question by contrasting the essence/appearance paradigm governing Western metaphysics and its deconstructive critics with the more fluid, dynamic, and participatory forms of encountering and performatively enacting the world that are articulated in Chinese thinking and made apparent in Chinese painting. In this hermeneutical contrast, Western and Chinese thinking themselves are (...) interpeted as co-relational rather than as discrete, mutually indifferent or ethnocentrically nativist traditions. (shrink)

Chinese painting is dominated by landscape painting, which is a unique form of artistic expression for Chinese people, while landscape generally refers to nature. Wild natural landscape can be called “wilderness,” which embodies the vitality and upward vitality of nature, and also contains unique cultural characteristics. “Wilderness” is the most important “original ecological” environment in the natural environment. Its existence has natural, ecological, and aesthetic significance. It is nature in its primitiveness and ecology in its wildness; the aesthetic (...) lives on in it. Compared with Western landscape painting, it pays particular attention to realism, good at depicting beautiful natural scenery and recording the reality of scenery. On the other hand, Chinese landscape painting pays more attention to the expression of connotation. Chinese landscape painting focuses on nature, takes meaning as its purpose and pursues culture. Chinese landscape painting is the outstanding expression of wilderness spirit, which is mainly manifested in three aspects: Chinese landscape painting is of the same origin as “Tao” ; the “wilderness” in landscape painting has a strong vitality; “wilderness” has a special cultural connotation. China’s wilderness is not ecological, but is vibrant; not in the dust, but out of the dust; not in nature, but in culture. (shrink)

The article analyzes the ideological foundations of the emergence and evolution of landscape in Chinese painting as an independent genre from the III to the XVIII century, before the rapid integration of Western European artistic traditions. Landscape painting is considered as an expression of the state of mind of Chinese artists, the prevailing philosophical ideas, in particular Taoism, the embodiment of literary images associated with the natural origin. Despite the attention of the scientific community to the development of (...) images of nature in the art of ancient and modern China, there are few studies devoted to the causes and justification of certain processes that influenced the formation of the genre. The purpose of the study is to analyze the reasons for the appearance of images and motifs in the landscapes of Chinese artists in connection with the philosophical ideas of that time, cultural connotations in poetry and the principles of landscape art. The tasks include determining the most typical range of scenes and images in landscapes created from the III to XVIII centuries. The material is the work of Chinese artists who lived since the reign of the Wei Dynasty, during the heyday of landscapes in the era of the Tang Dynasty and up to the XVIII century. Of interest is the study of the mechanism of influence on the formation of figurative systems in Chinese landscape painting that developed in parallel poetry and landscape art. (shrink)

Riassunto: La filosofia originale cinese è una sublimazione della coscienza culturale umana di base - la coscienza della vita e della riproduzione - che è l’unificazione del “Concetto di yin e yang” e del “Concetto di ciclo di vita “ in cui “lo yin e lo yang si uniscono per creare tutte le cose, e il ciclio dà una vita senza fine. La cultura originale cinese determina la visione filosofica, la visione artistica, il temperamento emotivo, la benessere psicologica e lo (...) spirito nazionale della nazione cinese. Il sistema filosofico cinese, che rappresenta l’unificazione della cosmologia, dell’epistemologia e della metodologia della nazione cinese, è un sistema filosofico completo e maturo che si è formato nella società tardo primitiva molto prima delle Dinastie Xia, Shang e Zhou. La cultura originale cinese, dalla cultura della ceramica dipinta di 7.000 anni fa fino ai giorni nostri, dalla cultura archeologica sotterranea alla cultura di massa terrestre, è un concetto ampio di belle arti, determinato da una visione filosofica dell’arte plastica di osservare gli oggetti e prendere immmagini. La cultura originale e la filosofia originale della Cina primitiva sono ancora conservate in un’eredità storica estremamente ricca e completa nella vita sociale della cultura di massa. Per questo motivo la Cina è l’unico Paese tra le civiltà antiche che non aver subito una frattura culturale. (shrink)

By melodic landscape, this paper points to natural milieus such as mountains whose motifs are caught up in contrapuntal relations. With Merleau-Ponty, the structure of the world is a symphony, and the production of life which implicates both organism and environment as unfurling of Umwelt is ‘a melody that sings itself’. For the Chinese culture, mountains have been deemed virtuous in Confucianism, immortal by Daoists, and spiritual for a Buddhist to reach a substrate level of pure stream of a-subjective (...) consciousness. A Chinese painter-poet within the ‘mountain-water’ genre would consider mountains as performance of events, a concert of vibration of light, shape and sound, movement and rest. Insofar as art is to create energy transfer, Chinese artists of mountains aim at concerting with nature as organised by rhythms and conspecifics, unfolding contrapuntal melodies with all kinds of counterpoints. As Deleuze and Guattari's notion of refrains are the three forces or tempos of chaos, earth and world confronting/converging one another, this paper endeavours to find out, first, how Deleuze and Guattari's geological, organic and alloplastic stratifications can be put alongside mountains, animals, plants and arts, and second, how this notion can contribute to our new appreciation of the way Chinese mountains in arts can give out music. (shrink)