Iconicity and indexicality: The body in Chinese art
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David Clarke
Abstract
This article examines the place of the body in Chinese art. It looks broadly at the case of literati painting and calligraphy and then offers a more historically focused examination of certain tendencies in modern Western-influenced Chinese painting, which was consciously antagonistic to literati values. Using Peirce’s distinction between iconic and indexical modes of signification, it argues that while evocation of the body was important in literati visual culture, this was achieved primarily by indexical means, whereas in early twentieth century Chinese visual culture, iconic modes of representation were to become dominant. This modern contestation of the visual economy of literati painting is found particularly in paintings of the female nude.
Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG
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- Semiotic perspective of psychiatric diagnosis
- On the relation between sound and meaning in Hicks’ Snow Falling on Cedars
- The revised fundamental sign
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- Iconicity and indexicality: The body in Chinese art
- The Human Genome Project: An increasingly elusive ‘human nature’
- Body and space: Michael Chekhov’s notion of atmosphere as the means of creating space in theatre
- Eyes, mirror, light: History’s other lenses
