Aesthetics Three Books

Author: Li Zehou
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-10-01
Features: China has very few specialized art museums. Have you ever visited the Chinese History Museum in front of Tiananmen Square? If you are not very familiar with those historical facts, how about taking a beautiful tour? The painted pottery basin with a fish face, the colorful bronze artifacts, the dazzling Han Dynasty crafts, the elegant Northern Wei sculptures, the dynamic calligraphy of the Jin and Tang dynasties, the endless Song and Yuan landscape paintings, and the imagined portraits of famous poets and writers like Qu Yuan, Tao Yuanming, Li Bai, Du Fu, and Cao Xueqin. Don’t they all showcase the soul history of this ancient civilization that you can directly feel? Aesthetics in Three Volumes collects three of the author’s renowned works on aesthetics, characterized by the fusion of modern philosophical concepts and traditional cultural spirit. The Journey of Beauty offers a macroscopic and bird’s-eye view of Chinese literature and art over thousands of years, proposing important concepts such as "dragon-flight and phoenix-dance," "the beauty of ferocity," "the complementarity of Confucianism and Taoism," "the romanticism of the Chu and Han dynasties," "the awakening of humanity (culture)," and the three categories of Buddhist sculpture, landscape painting, and calligraphy, all of which were previously unexplored. Huaxia Aesthetics, on the other hand, starts from traditional theory and delves deeper into the non-Dionysian characteristics of Huaxia culture, which emphasizes the integration of reason and desire. These two books form the internal (art history) and external (aesthetics) chapters of the author’s history of Chinese aesthetics. Four Lectures on Aesthetics is a systematic treatise on the author’s aesthetic thought, interpreting Marx’s concept of "the naturalization of man" through terms like "accumulation" and "cultural psychological structure," constructing the author’s own philosophical anthropology, and responding to Western philosophical and aesthetic ideas. This book has been a bestseller for over a decade and has had an influence beyond the field of aesthetics. This phenomenon perfectly proves an important viewpoint the author has repeatedly emphasized: aesthetics is the highest pursuit of the Chinese people.