A Comparative Study Of The Aesthetics Of Painting By Guo Xi And Cézanne

Guo Xi was an outstanding painter of the Northern Song period,and his study of landscape painting was profoundly influenced by Song dynasty philosophy.His aesthetic pursuit of the ’doctrine’ is also evident in his ’Lin Quan Gao Zhi Ji’,a collection of his lifelong creative experiences.As he put it,"true landscape" is a development and further elaboration of Zhang Huo’s theory of "learning from the outside and the inside",reflecting the aesthetic of "searching for the true" in "searching for the true".It embodies the aesthetic quality of "Tu Zhen".As a post-impressionist painter,Cézanne is also known as the "father of modern painting",in fact,it is precisely because of his pursuit of "art’s own harmony and parallelism with nature" in his paintings,with a view to "returning to nature itself" This is the expression of the true nature.It can be said that the aesthetics of Guo Xi and Cézanne’s paintings both reflect the aesthetic pursuit of ’truth’ and ’realism’,realising the unity of the ’truth’of concept and the ’truth’ of practice.The aesthetics of both Cézanne’s and Hézanne’s paintings reflect the aesthetic pursuit of "truth" and "realism",achieving the unity of "truth" in concept and "truth" in practice.This "truth" is also the presentation of the philosophical meaning of "Tao" and "existence".In China today,many scholars combine imagery aesthetics with phenomenology to discuss the "unity of heaven and man" and "existential intersubjectivity" that dissolves the contradiction between subject and object,arguing that art achieves a glimpse and expression of the "true " As Heidegger put it,’beauty is a way of being present as an unclouded truth’,making a dialogue between Chinese and Western art possible.In this perspective,both paintings show many parallel aspects that can be discussed from the "truth".In this paper,the aesthetics of Guo Xi’s and Cézanne’s paintings are studied in comparison from the perspective of ’imagery under phenomenological interpretation’ and ’the creation of an image in order to exhaust the meaning’.The study explores how the pursuit and realisation of ’portraiture’ in the paintings of the two artists is carried out,and identifies the commonalities and differences in their aesthetic thinking.In order to capture the main lines of research without losing the details of Guo Xi’s and Cézanne’s aesthetics,the study is conducted in a parallel manner,combined with discussion,rather than in a cross-cutting manner.The paper is developed in four main sections.Firstly,the scope of imagery in a clear phenomenological context.Secondly,it discusses the pursuit and realisation of the real nature in both paintings.Thirdly,it discusses how Guo Xi and Cézanne grasped the real in the sense of ’the way’ and ’being’ from the perspective of ’looking at things and taking images’,as well as their inner states of mind at the time of looking at them.The discussion is based on how Guo Xi and Sechan grasped the meaning of ’Tao’ and ’existence’ and their inner states when they viewed it.Ultimately,from the perspective of’creating an image in order to fulfil a meaning’,the connotations of their formal language as a ’meaningful form’ drawn from nature and how they make the images present natural imagery with real meaning are explored.