At this point in the class you should be ready to look at the world through the eyes of someone from another culture. The issue we will focus on in this assignment is "representation." This is a complex term that refers to just about every communicative act that humans engage in; it can be understood as the combination of two things:
1. Perceiving the physical world-representation is always, to some extent, about perception of the real world, whether it's outside or inside the self;
2. World view-representation is always about imposing one's world view on what one is perceiving.
While representation is always about perception, as a communicative act it is primarily about world view, that is, it is about communicating one's understanding of what one is perceiving. That world view is always inherited from the culture; while we have romantic notions about the creative powers of artists, essentially all artists get their ideas from the culture around them.
This has some very interesting consequences. If all representation, and this includes painting, sculpture, photography, literature, etc., is about imposing a world view on what one perceives, then all representation can be used, to some extent, to figure out the world view of the culture that gave rise to it.
Chinese Landscape Painting
The predominant mode of Chinese painting after the Han Synthesis was landscape painting. Landscapes may seem to have nothing to do with world view -the artist, after all, is only painting what he or she sees, right? Wrong. The artist is also imposing a world view on what they are seeing; landscape painting is always about the way the artist, living in a particular culture, imposes world view on the act of perception.
The Chinese have very detailed theories about painting and about the interpretation of painting. Every aspect of a painting, from color to brush stroke, has theoretical relationships to ideas in Confucius, Taoism, the Five Material Agents, yin and yang, and even to Buddhist principles. What these elaborate theories mean is that when a Chinese looked at one of these paintings, what they saw was the visual representation of Confucian, Taoist, wu-hsing, and Buddhist ideas.
What you will do for this assignment is to look at a Chinese landscape painting through the eyes of a Chinese schooled in looking at and interpreting these paintings. The painting is below:
You already know something about Confucianism, Taoism and wu-hsing philosophy; now you will see the world through Confucianism, Taoism, or wu-hsing. On this written assignment, you are to choose one of these three philosophical schools (Confucianism, Taoism, or Five Agents) and apply the principles of that philosophy to explaining why the painting was painted the way it was. In your response, you should briefly describe the philosophy. Then you should focus on the painting above and its visual elements--color, contrast, definition, size, perspective, and so on--and explain how these visual elements relate to the philosophy described in your first paragraph. You should focus less on what is being represented (that is, what the artist is seeing) and focus more on how it's being painted (that is, on how the artist visually communicates world view).
Materials
In order to make this argument, you are to use the following sources:
a.) The text of Confucius's Analects or Lao Tzu, or the discussion of the
Han Synthesis, Five Agents, and yin/yang.
b.) Chinese terms and concepts that you've learned in these texts or from
the glossary.
c.) You should also develop your answer from a previous answer submitted by
another student.
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