The Zoomorphic Imagination in Chinese Art and Culture
Jerome Silbergeld and Eugene Y. Wang
Abstract
The zoomorphic imagination of Chinese artists was inhabited by some animals as carefully observed and rendered as in any scientific study, by other animals bred from sheer fantasy or concocted from various real beasts, representing various divinities or divine diversity, and by still others appropriated to serve as rhetorical substitutes for certain people or social groups. These are eleven in-depth topical and case studies of the thought and culture which permeated animal representations and the representations that in turn permeated their cultures, stretching historically from the Chinese br ... More
The zoomorphic imagination of Chinese artists was inhabited by some animals as carefully observed and rendered as in any scientific study, by other animals bred from sheer fantasy or concocted from various real beasts, representing various divinities or divine diversity, and by still others appropriated to serve as rhetorical substitutes for certain people or social groups. These are eleven in-depth topical and case studies of the thought and culture which permeated animal representations and the representations that in turn permeated their cultures, stretching historically from the Chinese bronze age to China's encounters with the counter-reformational Catholic Church, and down to the present day. Throughout these chapters is described a world whose creatures one must know in the Chinese way if one is to know the Chinese world.
Keywords:
zoomorphism,
anthropomorphism,
animal deities,
Chinese rhetoric,
animal painting,
animals in Buddhism,
animals in Daoism,
Confucian attitudes to nature
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780824846763 |
Published to Hawaii Scholarship Online: May 2017 |
DOI:10.21313/hawaii/9780824846763.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Jerome Silbergeld, editor
Princeton University
Eugene Y. Wang, editor
Harvard University
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