Search

China has rightly been characterized as a "realm of the poetic arts." For more than 3000 years the form of the poem ( shi) was the most elegant vehicle for the expression of the Chinese intellect. Especially the classical poetry of the Tang era created a wealth of poetic images which is unsurpassed not only in China. Until 1911 no other literary genre in the Middle Kingdom could compete with the poetic arts in terms of significance, spiritual richness, and expressive powers. However, this changed with the decline of the monarchy. Since the onset of modernity, poetry in China, as in We…

There has always been aesthetic thinking in China, although not as a philosophical discipline. It was only established as a field under Western influence during the course of the 20th century. Its Chinese name meixue is a foreign word from the Japanese and is deceptive, since aesthetics in China is certainly not at all a matter of the "study of beauty." The cosmic and cosmological always stood at the center of an aesthetic perspective in traditional China, and this is sometimes still the case in modern China (cosmology). Zong Baihua (1897-1986) and Zhu Guangqian (1897-1986) can be…