Spirit of Chinese Art

Author: Xu Fuguan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2007-01-01
Features: The Spirit of Chinese Art is divided into ten chapters. Except for the chapter discussing the spirit of ancient music art, the remaining nine chapters focus on painting art and the Chinese artistic spirit it embodies. The book is filled with profound insights, clear reasoning, and an extraordinary literary style. Xu Fuguan conducts an in-depth study of Zhuangzi's concepts of learning the Dao, embodying the Dao, and achieving the Dao, discovering many similarities or parallels between these ideas and the discussions on beauty and art by modern and contemporary Western thinkers. He thus concludes that Zhuangzi's Dao is the very spirit of Chinese art. This approach has been groundbreaking in the study of the spirit of Chinese art. The Spirit of Chinese Art is a synthesis of aesthetic theory and historical research. Together with his History of Han Thought, it is considered [now regarded as a classic essential reading for anyone aspiring to study the history of Chinese thought].