Chinese drawing, architectural poetics : traditional painting as a semantic representation of modern architectural design

This thesis is partly an attempt to explore the potential of pre-modern Chinese painting, on its distinctive formats and schemes to achieve spatial depth and time duration, as a way to interpret and design architecture. By a survey on changing modes of Chinese traditional landscape and cityscape paintings in different scales, the poetic language of painting will be gradually explored. Beyond pictorial techniques, language is concerned with an ideological level of understanding and experience. Thus, it signposts a wider significance of architectural representation – as a verbal medium to express narrative and critic semantics besides visual effects. In this thesis, we will also see how traditional painting remains a base in the ideating process of several contemporary Chinese architects, so to avoid a mere uncritical imitation of international models. A subtle fusion of contemporaneity with cultural identity afforded by the presence of taken concepts from traditional painting, allows this architecture to increase its meaning and dimension. Lastly, understanding such processes of ideation can possibly provide us assistance in the intuitive formulation of ways to enrich Western architecture. Particularly, establishing poetic connections to our cultural traditions can be a useful strategy to prevent Western architecture's frequent falls into empty excesses of utilitarianism, iconicism or simple banality.Esta tesis en parte intenta explorar la capacidad de la pintura china pre-moderna en sus peculiares formatos y esquemas para lograr expresar la profundidad del espacio y la duración del tiempo, como una manera de interpretar y diseñar arquitectura contemporánea. Mediante un estudio de la pintura tradicional de temática paisajística y urbana, y a diferentes escalas, se analizará el lenguaje poético de la pintura china. Más allá de las técnicas pictóricas, este lenguaje se sitúa en un nivel ideológico de comprensión y experiencia; expresa, por tanto, una gama de significados más amplia que la mera representación arquitectónica, actúa como lo haría un medio verbal para expresar una semántica de tipo crítico y narrativo, además de los consiguientes efectos visuales. En esta tesis, también veremos cómo la pintura tradicional sigue siendo la base del proceso de creación de ideas de varios arquitectos chinos contemporáneos para evitar así una mera imitación acrítica de modelos internacionales. Una fusión sutil de la contemporaneidad con la identidad cultural proporcionada por la presencia de conceptos de la pintura tradicional permite a esta arquitectura ganar nuevas capas de significado y dimensión. Por último, comprender tales procesos de ideación puede brindarnos ayuda en la formulación intuitiva de formas de enriquecer la arquitectura occidental. En particular, establecer conexiones poéticas con nuestras tradiciones culturales puede ser una estrategia útil para prevenir las frecuentes caídas de la arquitectura occidental en los excesos vacíos del utilitarismo, el iconicismo o la simple banalidad.Postprint (published version

Violets between Cherry Blossoms. The diffusion of classical motifs to the East

This richly illustrated book is a comparative study, which shows how motifs and images travelled throughout Eurasia from Rome to Tokyo. It covers a period from around the early fifth century BC up until today. It is likely that already in the fifth century BC there was some indirect cultural exchange between the Black Sea region and China. From the second to the sixth century AD elements of Greco-Buddhist culture gradually found their way to China and subsequently, from the mid-sixth century AD on, reached Japan. This book is the first comprehensive work to provide a critical and compelling study of the cultural flow across this extensive area. It shows convincingly how Greek images and motifs travelled East, were adopted and preserved in Chinese art and how they spread to Japan

Picture Collection Subject Index

The Subject Files cover people, places, objects, design, fashion, buildings, nature, and concepts. Research a time period by looking at subjects that are subdivided chronologically, such as Automobiles, Costume, Family Life, Advertising, Furniture, Interiors, Houses, Street Scenes, and U.S. History. The collection covers many decades, from the 19th century to the present day, and contains many images that you won\u27t find on the internet, and they all circulate!https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/picturecollection_indexes/1000/thumbnail.jp

The Ontology of the Venetian Halo in its Italian Context

This thesis aims to reposition the halo’s status within an artwork through arguing a reassessment of its activity 'as a sign' rather than acceptance of its passivity. This active state is further explored and expanded by a heuristic application of semiotic theory to interrogate its fluctuation between sign/non-sign and its oscillation between a seemingly real status and behaviour juxtaposed with its very consciously artificial “manifestation”. A variety of halo shapes are considered, together with texture contained in and on its surface, and this has revealed the Venetian and Venetan artistic innovation of “glass” and “silk” haloes, through artists’ utilisation of contemporaneous industrial practices and their application to halo appearance. Additionally, extant architectural vocabulary is translated and reformulated into internal halo motifs by Venetian and Venetan artists, further enhancing the halo’s somatic characteristics, contextualized by examination of halo representation in various media in Florence, Rome and Siena, and a consideration of haloes within other, mainly Italian, centres. Additionally, the fugitive and transient qualities of the nimbus are noted, with its mimesis of the dying corporeal body in its fading insubstantiality, a further factor in its inexorably reductive form as increasing realism in art challenges its ontological traits. Textual characters contained within the halo body are also examined in their many forms and languages and their contribution to an intertextual function espoused by the ideologeme. An adjunct to this function is the halo’s propagandist role presented by artists. It will be demonstrated how all these different strands of interpretation are imbricated in the changing theological, political and societal landscape, encapsulated within the halo

Evocations of Nature in Selected Piano Works by Debussy

The connection between nature and the music of Claude Debussy is unique and fascinating, with nature serving as a source of influence and inspiration for Debussy. Debussy looked upon nature with veneration and this viewpoint helped to form the musical ideals that he pursued while breaking with the traditional forms of music. References to nature appear in the descriptive titles of many works by Debussy, but this research focuses on selected piano works from his two books of Images. Debussy’s sense of connection to nature in his music, especially when viewed through the lenses of the Impressionist and Symbolist movements, along with influences from the Javanese Gamelan, helps us to understand the formation of his musical background in the fin-de-siècle era. Ultimately, we can see from Debussy’s writings that his goal in music is to achieve a freedom that already exists within the realms of nature and the imagination

1 Folklore and New Media communications: an exploration of Journey to the West, its modern orality and traditional storytelling in contemporary online spaces

This paper is the study of Journey to the West as a medium and cultural commodity rather than merely a novel; one that has been continuously told in one form or another for over a thousand years. I examine the story diachronically, through a media ecology lens, in an effort to understand the story's traditions through temporal synchronic studies. I propose that the study of the book has largely overshadowed the true scope of the story’s cultural importance. I posit that Journey to the West is a medium that should be considered separately from the technologies and media that use it as content. I assert that its components and structural elements are deeply rooted in the Chinese oral tradition, which is reliant on the interplay of orality and literacy. I complete a content analysis of film and television texts to validate this hypothesis. I use the results to identify patterns across the texts that can be explored more deeply across historical texts in the Journey to the West canon. The aim of this analysis is to identify storytelling motifs that can be traced back to the popularised novel and its antecedents. I also look at the discourse surrounding online culture and storytelling relating to the milieu of pre-literate societies, and how modern devices may also mimic elements of storytelling experience in Journey to the West's past. The evidence points to a complex relationship between medium, technology and audience, the investigation of which, I argue, demonstrates culturally contextual episteme within the story. I finally assert that the story and the Monkey King are an environment that is immersive due to the multitude of texts and representations within Chinese culture. This I state, is why the story has such substantive cultural value; it goes almost unnoticed and therefore becomes a powerful medium to tell stories laden with messages that the storyteller wishes to make