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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Articles in the same Issue
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Genome as (hyper)text: From metaphor to theory
- The work of Peirce’s Dicisign in representationalizing early deictic events
- The double function of the interpretant in Peirce’s theory of signs
- Integration mechanism and transcendental semiosis
- The communicative wheel: Symptom, signal, and model in multimodal communication
- Discursive representation: Semiotics, theory, and method
- Translation as sign exploration: A semiotic approach based on Peirce
- When does the ritual of mythic symbolic type start and when does it end?
- Iconoclasms of Emmett Till and his killers in Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle: A new generation of historiographic metafiction
- A dialogical semiosis of traveling narratives for self-interpretation: Towards activity-semiotics
- Entre éthologie et sémiotique : Mondes animaux, compétences et accommodation
- A pentadic model of semiotic analysis
- Linguistic violence and the “body to come”: The performativity of hate speech in J. Derrida and J. Butler
- Cultural tourism as pilgrimage
- A simple traffic-light semiotic model for tagmemic theory
- From resistance to reconciliation and back again: A semiotic analysis of the Charlie Hebdo cover following the January 2015 events
- Bilingual and intersemiotic representation of distance(s) in Chinese landscape painting: from yi (‘meaning’) to yi (‘freedom’)
- Power-organizing and Ethic-thinking as two paralleled praxes in the historical existence of mankind: A semiotic analysis of their functional segregation
- Semiosic translation
- Construction of new epistemological fields: Interpretation, translation, transmutation
- A biosemiotic reading of Michel Onfray’s Cosmos: Rethinking the essence of communication from an ecocentric and scientific perspective
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- Intrinsic functionality of mathematics, metafunctions in Systemic Functional Semiotics
- Ciudadanos: The myth of neutrality
- Multilingualism and sameness versus otherness in a semiotic context