Wen, Feiyi;
(2020)
Above the Still Lake: Lyrical Sensibilities in Visual Art -Thinking through photographic practice: Pathos, Eastern Asian aesthetics and the language of emotion.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
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.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Above the Still Lake: Lyrical Sensibilities in Visual Art -Thinking through photographic practice: Pathos, Eastern Asian aesthetics and the language of emotion |
| Event: | UCL(University College London) |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2020. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > The Slade School of Fine Art |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10114635 |
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