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School of Letters Department of Humanities Philosophy Course Aesthetics and History of Fine Arts Major Major (Credit 2) Intended Year: Intended School: |
History of Oriental Fine Arts (Lecture VIII)
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Numbering Code: LET-HUM4262J Course Code: 17055602 2017 FallTerm weekly Fri2 Hakozaki Classroom J科目 (日本語, 日本語) |
| Course Overview |
In this class, I will examine the visual representations of Buddhist icons in an attempt to identify the general characteristics of Chinese Song and Yuan Buddhist paintings and Korean Goryeo Buddhist paintings. Considering representational functions of Buddhist paintings, Southern Song images may be classified into three categories; visualized image, apparition images, and summoned images. Visualized images refer to paintings that represent the image of Buddha as perceived in one’s mind, corresponding to the practice of visualizing the Buddha. Apparition images, contrary to the visualized images, refer to paintings depicting Buddha and Buddhist deities, otherwise resident in their heavenly abodes, who appear in this world by means of their supernatural powers. Finally, summoned images are paintings representing Buddha who, invoked and summoned by the faithful, emerges from the ideal world of light into the physical world of vieissitudes. The third type of images is characterized by Buddha portrayed moving in the air on his way to this world. The Yuan dynasty in China witnessed the emergence of a new type of visual representation of Buddha, which can be described as syncretic images of Buddhism with Daoism. It brought major changes to the visual representation of Buddhist painting, which until this time had followed the style of the Southern Song period. In these syncretic images, the distance between this world and ideal world becomes further blurred, ultimately bringing Buddha, depicted in Southern Song Buddhist paintings as residing in the ideal world and removed from this world, to the real world, in front of the eyes of the faithful. |
| Last updated | : 2017/10/4 (00:11) |