620 research outputs found

    The Exterior and Interior World of The Qing Calligrapher Yi Bingshou

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    Honors (Bachelor's)History of ArtUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/120574/1/linyic.pd

    From the traditional national style to the artistic development of contemporary traditional art

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    Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College

    The materiality, style, and culture of calligraphy in the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127)

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    The cultural accomplishments of the Northern Song dynasty are unrivalled in Chinese history. Song literati were particularly enthusiastic about calligraphy and writing materials, and the scale of their engagement in the art of writing exceeded that of both former and later dynasties, leaving plentiful legacies of calligraphic culture for later generations to study and appreciate. However, most modern studies emphasize the transmission of calligraphic culture from the Tang to Song and neglect the dynamics of disconnection and transformation between these two dynasties. By demonstrating how the technologies of brush, paper, ink cake, ink stone, and chair and desk (the "materiality" of calligraphy) shaped the look of calligraphy, this dissertation proposes an alternative understanding of the nature of Song innovations in the art of writing. Insofar as these innovations reconfigured the subsequent history of Sinitic calligraphy (calligraphic traditions based on Chinese characters), this dissertation argues that we cannot understand the art of writing without exploring the technology of writing. Through this study, I present the processes by which the literati of Northern Song traced, received, and modified the calligraphic culture of the past in creating their own Northern Song culture. Because of cultural discontinuity and transformation, what they ultimately reconstructed served as the foundation for their own culture, and has become the basis for how we think of the pre-Song past

    A Comparative Study: The Tangxieben and Songkanben of the Shuowen Jiezi

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    abstract: The Shuowen jiezi 說文解字 [Explaining depictions of reality and analyzing graphs of words] (100 AD), written by Xu Shen 許慎of Eastern Han dynasty, is known as the first comprehensive dictionary for Chinese characters. However, the earliest complete edition of the Shuowen available today is the Songkanben 宋刊本 (Woodblock printed edition from the Song dynasty). As a result, Songkanben is employed as the primary source in most studies on the Shuowen conducted by scholars after the Song dynasty. In 1982, the discovery of Tangxieben Shuowen mubu canjuan 唐寫本說文木部殘卷 (The incomplete juan under wood classifier of the Shuowen written in manuscript form in the Tang), shed light on a new angle of view in examining the Shuowen, mostly developed from Songkanben. In this paper, after an introduction on the Songkanben by Xu brothers, as well as the discovery and dating of the incomplete manuscript form of Shuowen from Tang, a comparative study between the Songkanben and Tangxieben of the Shuowen from five aspects: order of entries, the appearance of the Small Seal script of a few entries, the explanation of the meaning of some characters, the graphic analyze and the fanqie 反切 phonetic notation for some entries. The hypothesis presented in this thesis is that Tangxieben, with its antiquarian value, advantages and features, though not older for sure, may belong to an older tradition. And it suggests that there is a scholarship of the Shuowen during the Tang. And Xiao Xuben 小徐本by Xu Kai 徐鍇 (920-74), from some specific aspects in the comparison, tends to be closer to Tangxieben compared with Da Xuben 大徐本by Xu Xuan 徐鉉 (917-92). Consequently, as the original text of the Shuowen is not available today and what we have studied on the Shuowen basically is based on the editions by Xu brothers, it would be reasonable to keep this in mind, and refer to different editions of the Shuowen and critically examine them in philological studies related to it when apply and study the Shuowen nowadays.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Asian Languages and Civilizations 201

    Behavioral response, plan sorting, and financial protection in health insurance markets

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    In both developed and developing countries, it is important to know about consumer behavior in the health insurance market. The first essay analyzes the behavioral response to income cutoffs of a subsidized health insurance program in the Massachusetts reform. Subsidies in the program are based on household income and have explicit income cutoffs. This feature creates nonlinear budget constraints for households' consumption, and potentially distorts their income and labor supply. I test the existence of income manipulation using the regression discontinuity approach on data from the American Community Survey. I find clear evidence of income discontinuity around the cutoffs of 150% and 300% of the Federal Poverty Level. I construct a structural model to estimate the elasticity of labor supply with respect to wage rates using the discontinuity evidence, suggest a methodology to calculate the welfare loss, and project the magnitude of behavioral response in the national health reform. The second essay analyzes consumer choice of health insurance plans after U.S. health reform. In the new state-run "Health Insurance Exchanges" created as part of the Affordable Care Act, plans with different benefit coverage of health care costs are provided in order to expand consumer choices and increase consumer welfare. According to the Act, premiums can differ based on enrollees' characteristics and plan revenues are risk-adjusted by regulators who transfer revenue from low to high risk plans. This essay examines how risk adjustment and premium discrimination affect consumers' choices of plans theoretically and empirically. I find that under plausible conditions risk adjustment and premium discrimination encourage consumers to enroll in plans with high benefit coverage. The third essay studies how a new Chinese rural health insurance program affects adverse selection and impacts enrollees' out-of-pocket costs. Using a national four-year panel dataset to address households' participating behavior and the impact of the plan, I show that adverse selection was not severe at household level, and the impact of the program on reducing out-of-pocket expense is greater for the rich than that for the poor, although on average was not statistically significant

    RCRN: Real-world Character Image Restoration Network via Skeleton Extraction

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    Constructing high-quality character image datasets is challenging because real-world images are often affected by image degradation. There are limitations when applying current image restoration methods to such real-world character images, since (i) the categories of noise in character images are different from those in general images; (ii) real-world character images usually contain more complex image degradation, e.g., mixed noise at different noise levels. To address these problems, we propose a real-world character restoration network (RCRN) to effectively restore degraded character images, where character skeleton information and scale-ensemble feature extraction are utilized to obtain better restoration performance. The proposed method consists of a skeleton extractor (SENet) and a character image restorer (CiRNet). SENet aims to preserve the structural consistency of the character and normalize complex noise. Then, CiRNet reconstructs clean images from degraded character images and their skeletons. Due to the lack of benchmarks for real-world character image restoration, we constructed a dataset containing 1,606 character images with real-world degradation to evaluate the validity of the proposed method. The experimental results demonstrate that RCRN outperforms state-of-the-art methods quantitatively and qualitatively.Comment: Accepted to ACM MM 202

    Volumetric cloud generation using a Chinese brush calligraphy style

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    Includes bibliographical references.Clouds are an important feature of any real or simulated environment in which the sky is visible. Their amorphous, ever-changing and illuminated features make the sky vivid and beautiful. However, these features increase both the complexity of real time rendering and modelling. It is difficult to design and build volumetric clouds in an easy and intuitive way, particularly if the interface is intended for artists rather than programmers. We propose a novel modelling system motivated by an ancient painting style, Chinese Landscape Painting, to address this problem. With the use of only one brush and one colour, an artist can paint a vivid and detailed landscape efficiently. In this research, we develop three emulations of a Chinese brush: a skeleton-based brush, a 2D texture footprint and a dynamic 3D footprint, all driven by the motion and pressure of a stylus pen. We propose a hybrid mapping to generate both the body and surface of volumetric clouds from the brush footprints. Our interface integrates these components along with 3D canvas control and GPU-based volumetric rendering into an interactive cloud modelling system. Our cloud modelling system is able to create various types of clouds occurring in nature. User tests indicate that our brush calligraphy approach is preferred to conventional volumetric cloud modelling and that it produces convincing 3D cloud formations in an intuitive and interactive fashion. While traditional modelling systems focus on surface generation of 3D objects, our brush calligraphy technique constructs the interior structure. This forms the basis of a new modelling style for objects with amorphous shape

    Of the Use of Calligraphy in Sino-Javanese Communities (18th-Early 21st Centuries)

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    Calligraphic art was conceived by the Chinese as a technique allowing the acquisition of certain virtues, and the mastery of this art as a proof of eminent qualities. This art dates back to the ancient times. Calligraphy has also been practiced by artists, either amateurs or professionals, who had practical and economic motivations, such as some Ming loyalists who having refused to serve the new dynasty were compelled to rely on this art for negotiating everyday life. Here, we intend to explore the part played by calligraphy in a diasporic milieu, and more especially in Java where Chinese communities have a rather long, but quite eventful history. We will successively review the development of calligraphy during the Qing times, its ups and downs during the 20th century, and its revival during this century in relation with the new political conjuncture.L’art calligraphique a été conçu par les Chinois comme une technique permettant d’acquérir certaines vertus, et la maîtrise de cet art comme une preuve de qualités exceptionnelles. Cet art remonte à la haute antiquité. Il a aussi été pratiqué par des artistes amateurs et professionnels dont les motivations étaient économiques, tels certains loyalistes Ming ayant refusé de servir la nouvelle dynastie, qui furent amenés à pratiquer la calligraphie comme moyen d’existence. Ici, nous entendons explorer le rôle de la calligraphie dans la diaspora et plus particulièrement à Java où les communautés chinoises ont une longue histoire passablement mouvementée. Nous étudierons successivement le développement de la calligraphie sous les Qing, ses hauts et bas pendant le XXe siècle, et son renouveau au début du XXIe siècle en rapport avec la nouvelle conjoncture politique

    CharFormer: A Glyph Fusion based Attentive Framework for High-precision Character Image Denoising

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    Degraded images commonly exist in the general sources of character images, leading to unsatisfactory character recognition results. Existing methods have dedicated efforts to restoring degraded character images. However, the denoising results obtained by these methods do not appear to improve character recognition performance. This is mainly because current methods only focus on pixel-level information and ignore critical features of a character, such as its glyph, resulting in character-glyph damage during the denoising process. In this paper, we introduce a novel generic framework based on glyph fusion and attention mechanisms, i.e., CharFormer, for precisely recovering character images without changing their inherent glyphs. Unlike existing frameworks, CharFormer introduces a parallel target task for capturing additional information and injecting it into the image denoising backbone, which will maintain the consistency of character glyphs during character image denoising. Moreover, we utilize attention-based networks for global-local feature interaction, which will help to deal with blind denoising and enhance denoising performance. We compare CharFormer with state-of-the-art methods on multiple datasets. The experimental results show the superiority of CharFormer quantitatively and qualitatively.Comment: Accepted by ACM MM 202

    An Investigation of Holographic Technologies Applied to Contemporary Art Practice A new approach to temporal aesthetics

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    The works of contemporary art using audio, 35mm slide, video, film and computer- based technologies are commonly referred to as time-based media, since they have duration as a dimension. By looking at artworks which are classified in this category, it appears that temporal visual perceptual interpretations are mainly created through the use of the illusion of movement, which is primarily constituted by sequential images. In art holography, the light-based characteristic qualities of this medium compose a kinetic and interactive visual syntax, which are not seen in other imaging technologies, stating its unique creative possibilities. Thus, this study intends to employ holography as an art medium to explore its temporal properties in order to establish a new approach to time-based media art practice. To review the practice and artworks created for this study, the author recognises that the characteristic qualities of a medium is key for the development of its own aesthetic culture. Moreover, the author also identifies that the combination of both the slips form of a hologram and a portable lighting device would be fundamental elements of the suggested new approach. This approach integrates the holographic image replaying process and the Chinese bamboo slips structure to create a scroll form of an artwork presentation, which suggests a viewer to observe with an unrolling activity, section by section. The role of light in this approach is essential as it not only reconstructs the image, but also acts as an intangible guide to indicate the viewing direction, which forms a directional linear temporal expression. This study combines the suggested approach with classical Chinese poetry to create a series of experimental artworks, demonstrating that the literal and figurative meaning of the poem could possibly be elevated through the manipulation of the light source and the scroll from of the image presentation, as the former creates the holographic kinetic expression and the latter reinforces the poetic linearity. This approach could be interpreted as a time-based holographic manifestation, as it unfolds the art to the viewer over time. Furthermore, in terms of the characteristic qualities of holography, the visual expressive techniques and aesthetic features created for this study indicate that such works cannot be recreated without the use of holography. This study reveals that the irreplaceable aesthetic qualities of holography, suggesting that it could expand and diversify the creative potential of time-based media art; and the discussion of this category would not be comprehensive unless taking this medium into consideration. This study establishes a creative possibility of holography and expects the finding to lead to a greater appreciation for future time-based media art practice, thus enriching the temporal artistic expressions. Moreover, as it is practice-based, the process of the research is primarily expressed through a series of holographic artworks, and combined with written format of discussion, which is presented in this thesis. For comprehensive understanding, reading the thesis in conjunction with viewing the artworks in person is suggested, as the photographic reproduction of the holographic images in this thesis is only for illustration purpose
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