all the f words we used to know

Photos of handwritten list of the 2,000+ F words listed in the 1996 version of Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (Deluxe Edition), published by Gramercy Books of Random House Press in Avenal, New Jersey. Verb tense conjugations and plural nouns are omitted. An analysis briefly contextualizes this artwork in relation to semiotic theory, contemporary text-based and word-based art and arts practices, social theory, and art education

Volumetric cloud generation using a Chinese brush calligraphy style

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

Re-conceptualizing foreignness : the English translation of Chinese calligraphic culture

Foreignness is one primary concern of Translation Studies. Chinese calligraphy, with its unique aesthetic pursuits and cultural underpinnings, presents an unusual case of foreign otherness in relation to the English language. Thus, theories derived from the translation of Chinese calligraphic culture into English can contribute to our existing knowledge of the nature of translation. Despite sporadic endeavors, translation issues related to Chinese calligraphy remain largely under-researched. This thesis constructs a theoretical framework that offers new perspectives on translating foreignness by exploring how the culture of Chinese calligraphy, concretized in the discourses of classical treatises, has been translated into English since the early 20th century. The study of English discourses on Chinese calligraphy, which include linguistic translation, cultural translation, cultural domestication, and statements of facts, reveals a special translational mode that features an interactive and flexible re-contextualization of Chinese calligraphic culture. This study finds that while the traditional practice of translation does not guarantee cross-cultural comprehensibility, the English texts have accommodated the culture of Chinese calligraphy by reconstructing its basics and resorting to visual means of representation. This thesis divides textual manifestations of Chinese calligraphic culture into three parts –– terms, descriptions and metaphors. For terms, I hold that the study of their translations from etymological perspectives implies the possibility of an endless debate on what constitutes a good translation. My study demonstrates that the repeated use of some widely accepted translations is harmless to cultural genuineness and cross-cultural understanding. For descriptive expressions, translation effects diverge from bringing out literal meanings to revealing cultural meanings. Besides, cultural dilution of varying degrees is found in translation. Calligraphic metaphors, which exemplify traditional Chinese worldviews and correlative thinking patterns, are largely unfamiliar to English-speaking readers. My study reveals a re-contextualizing endeavor that revitalizes these metaphors in the Anglo-American context. On the basis of the case study of the English texts on Chinese calligraphy, this thesis proposes a new theoretical framework for re-conceptualizing foreignness. The three components of this framework are bicultural competency, intercultural competency, and cross-cultural attitudes, all gravitating towards the goal of understanding foreignness. In addition, I introduce three levels of foreign knowledge that cover one’s perception of foreignness at different stages of understanding and with different depths. I also propose to expand the meaning of intercultural integration that is a key manifestation of intercultural competency. One salient part of this framework is that I place anthropological and traditional Chinese zhihui approaches under the structure of cross- cultural attitudes. Such a theoretical advancement empowers the explanative mechanism of the framework. Finally, I argue that the representation of foreignness as it is can be accomplished by strategic re-contextualization, and thus meanings lost in one place can be regained somewhere else

Playing cards with Cézanne : how the contemporary artists of China copy and recreate

textMy dissertation investigates the concepts and techniques of “copying” and appropriation in contemporary Chinese art, which, despite its phenomenal growth, has seldom been credited as original. Critics either condemn the Chinese artists’ willingness to appropriate from others as a lack of individuality, or declare it as a peculiarly “Chinese” quality. This paper, instead, argues that the Chinese artists deliberately adopt such “copying” as a visual strategy, in order to reexamine the traditions they “borrowed”, to reflect on their own cultural status in the modern world, and to challenge the conventional concept of originality--namely, to show that originality is not created by irreducible individuality or mystified inspiration, but by the author’s choice as well as manipulation of contexts. This strategy, I argue, is essential to the proper evaluation and interpretation of contemporary Chinese artworks. The first two chapters of my dissertation focus on laying out the context from which this art grows. I review how the ideas, styles and institutional structures of western modern art were imitated, questioned and redefined by the Chinese artists, from 1978 to the present; I then examine the conceptual complexity of originality and “copying” in the theories of modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism and in traditional Chinese art. The next two chapters focus on, respectively, calligraphy and photography in contemporary Chinese art, both of which contain the paradox between originality and “copying” in their very nature. The works of four artists, Xu Bing, Qiu Zhijie, Hong Hao and Zhao Bandi, are discussed in details. Xu's site-specific reproduction of “pseudo characters” manage to engage its targeted audiences, psychologically and physically; Qiu's obsessive yet futile copying of a canon of calligraphy returns the act of writing to its essence--a physical pursuit of one's spiritual state of being; Hong's photographic emulation of an ancient masterpiece suggests that painting may excel photography in its ability to portray a grand cityscape; Zhao’s simulacrum of pop culture paradigms enables him to evade political censorship, and to have an substantial yet ironic impact in a broader public sphere. Each of these works has made a unique contribution to the redefinition of artistic originality.Comparative Literatur

AutoGraff: towards a computational understanding of graffiti writing and related art forms.

The aim of this thesis is to develop a system that generates letters and pictures with a style that is immediately recognizable as graffiti art or calligraphy. The proposed system can be used similarly to, and in tight integration with, conventional computer-aided geometric design tools and can be used to generate synthetic graffiti content for urban environments in games and in movies, and to guide robotic or fabrication systems that can materialise the output of the system with physical drawing media. The thesis is divided into two main parts. The first part describes a set of stroke primitives, building blocks that can be combined to generate different designs that resemble graffiti or calligraphy. These primitives mimic the process typically used to design graffiti letters and exploit well known principles of motor control to model the way in which an artist moves when incrementally tracing stylised letter forms. The second part demonstrates how these stroke primitives can be automatically recovered from input geometry defined in vector form, such as the digitised traces of writing made by a user, or the glyph outlines in a font. This procedure converts the input geometry into a seed that can be transformed into a variety of calligraphic and graffiti stylisations, which depend on parametric variations of the strokes

Wang Yuanqi and the Orthodoxy of Self-Reflection in Early Qing Landscape Painting

This dissertation explores the life and art of Wang Yuanqi (1642-1715), one of the most influential literati artists of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). As a representative of the so-called “Orthodox Painting School,” Wang considered himself the heir to the genuine thousand-year-old tradition of Chinese painting. Throughout his lifetime, he made every effort to establish and consolidate the authority of his school of painting. Since his early years, he had been trained as a traditional Chinese literatus. Under the direct supervision of his grandfather, he practiced landscape paintings in the style of ancient masters, especially that of the Yuan literati painter, Huang Gongwang (1269-1354). However, he was never satisfied with the facsimiles of the old masterpieces. Beyond his models, he created new theories of composition and brushwork; he introduced a new style of light color landscape with unique techniques. Moreover, benefiting from the lenient cultural policies of the Kangxi emperor (r. 1661-1722), he successfully led a movement of canon-formation in artistic circles. The research of this thesis is based on three types of sources: 1) Wang Yuanqi’s published writings, 2) his paintings, and 3) publications and manuscripts by Wang’s contemporaries. Different from previous scholarship which mainly focuses on the classicism of Wang Yuanqi’s work, this dissertation provides a comprehensive study of Wang’s life and his circle and investigates the reason and procedure of the rise of the Orthodox Painting School in the early eighteenth century

Above the Still Lake: Lyrical Sensibilities in Visual Art -Thinking through photographic practice: Pathos, Eastern Asian aesthetics and the language of emotion

Drawing from Western and East Asian philosophical traditions, this thesis aims to compare different concepts of ‘Pathos’ as present in Chinese, Japanese and European traditions of art, and in particular photography. The overarching methodology is that of translation between different languages and cultural contexts, and the verbal and visual. Using methods from comparative literature and including case studies from East Asian and European poetry, film and artistic practice, the research looks at the tradition of the representation of ‘Landscape’ from Eastern and Western perspectives. This is a practice-led PhD and I explore these concepts associated with Pathos and landscape through the media of photography, moving image, object making and book-making. I draw parallels between my photographic practice and traditional Chinese landscape painting with respect to the framing, tonality, and non-specificity of place. My investigation of lighting, printing techniques and surfaces are methods for researching the space of the photograph. This thesis pivots on three related concepts; the Greek concept of Pathos, one of the three rhetorical appeals; Yi jing, an ancient Chinese artistic concept; and Mono no aware, an eighteenth-century Japanese aesthetic principle. The project begins by looking into a specific period of historical artistic changes in China and Japan during the Pictorialism movement, including a re-examination of the visual representations of photographic work of Chinese and Japanese periodicals from 1910 through to 1937. This research is inspired by an awareness of and an interest in the lack of scholarship on Eastern and Western notions of aesthetics as they apply to the accounts of photography during Republican China. This examination of Chinese photography is then framed through a reappraisal of Japanese aesthetics

Made in the USA: Rewriting Images of the Asian Fetish

My voice reveals the hidden power hidden within. A woman of Asian descent appears to be an entertainer, possibly a courtesan or geisha, wearing a pseudo-Chinese dress and hairdo; her hands are curled in front of her in an Oriental-like gesture as if she is dancing, and her head is tilted coyly with a cryptic smile (Figure 1). She gives a sexually suggestive expression and gaze but hesitates to speak. Another version with the same woman reads, In silence I see. With WISDOM, I speak. These advertisements make up one part of the Find Your Voice Virginia Slims campaign. The campaign consisted of four different ads, each featuring women of distinctive races with stereotyping text