Chinese Painting
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The computer's dataspace tools may be much like the brush of the Chinese scholar: they make no delineation between word, image, sound, or even statistical analysis. The Chinese written language is composed of pictograms, which represent words themselves and are thought to have evolved from iconic images that were used in divination around 2000 BCE. It is perhaps the closeness of image to word, and because traditionally the same brush was used to paint and to write, that have contributed to the coexistence of word and image in Chinese literature. Around the turn of the first millennium, Chinese painters began combining written characters with images on narrative scrolls and wall paintings. By the thirteenth century, the scholar-official began to paint and to write poetry as a means for developing a moral and disciplined inner self. During the Northern Sung Dynasty (960-1127 CE), painting turned from narratives of human history to portrayals of nature. By the Southern Sung Dynasty (1127-1279 CE), the scholar-officials turned their attention inward, away from realistic representations of nature in painting to more symbolic ones.
See Also
- Cathedral
- Mosque
- Synaesthesia
- Chinese Painting
- Mandalas
