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Bilingual and intersemiotic representation of distance(s) in Chinese landscape painting: from yi (‘meaning’) to yi (‘freedom’)

  • Chengzhi Jiang ORCID logo and Chunshen Zhu ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: October 31, 2018

Abstract

This paper studies cross-modal distance representation in traditional Chinese landscape painting in a contemporary museum context with special reference to the classic three axes of distance, i.e. level, deep, and high “distance.” It observes how an artwork’s “meaning” can be perceived through the bilingual presentation of the “distances” to bring about the realization of a “meditative distance,” or the artist’s aesthetic aspiration for a spiritual “freedom.” Informed by the theory of three meta-functions in Systemic Functional Linguistics and Arnheim’s discussion about distance cues, the study has closely examined a classical landscape painting in conjunction with its Chinese and English bilingual museum captions, with a view to tracing out their discursive meta-functions based on the visual-verbal coherence of distance representation. In so doing, the study takes museum discourse as a holistic multimodal interactive process of different sign systems at three levels of communication (i.e. extratextual, intersemiotic, and intertextual) to enable the modern viewer to better appreciate the aesthetic aspiration nursed by the meaning of the pictorially depicted distance(s) in an ancient landscape painting. The findings of the study will not only contribute to a better aesthetic contextualization of the traditional Chinese visual arts but also, in a practical vein, to the construction of a more informed museum discursive environment conducive to a spiritual journey, or a mental transcendence, that keeps the mundane world at a “meditative distance.”

Funding statement: This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities at Wuhan University, Grant No.: 410500056; and by a General Research Fund (GRF), Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China., Grant No.: CityU 11606515.

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Published Online: 2018-10-31
Published in Print: 2018-11-06

© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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