The Role of Contour Line in Painting — an Analysis of Morandi's Still Life Painting

In painting, line is one of the basic compositional elements and an important "tool" for artists to express their ideas. The combination of line and color, composition, and shape allows the viewer to feel the author's thoughts, emotions, or distinctive thinking through the picture. Foreign cave paintings, European pre-Renaissance oil paintings and modern paintings, and domestic Dunhuang murals, silk paintings of the Warring States period and cave paintings all show that the contour line has never disappeared despite its different roles in the changing times. Therefore, the artist's generalized expression of contour lines can become a characteristic of the picture that makes the artist stand out.

Naming and Cosmology: The Role of Names in the Onto-Generative Process

The article takes the excavated cosmological texts as a basis for reinterpreting the relationship between cosmology, epistemology, and action in Warring States period thought, by focusing on the role of names in situatedness and self-actualization of being. It proposes to view the speculative and the practical concerns in terms of a dynamic union of the receptive and the creative within the onto-generative cycle. Building on Chung-ying Cheng’s onto-generative approach and Heidegger’s hermeneutics of Dasein in Sein und Zeit, the article identifies names as the centre (Gadamer’s Mitte) in which the receptive and the creative aspect of being come together.

A Dramaturgy of Death: Performing (And Spectating) Filial Piety in Early China

This essay analyzes the early Chinese elite discourse on filial death rituals, arguing that early Chinese texts depict these rituals as performance events. Building on spectacle of xiao sacrifices in the Western Zhou Dynasty, Eastern Zhou authors conceived of filial death rituals as dramaturgical phenomena that underscored not only what needed to be performed, but also how it should be performed, and led to an important distinction between personal dispositions and inherited ritual protocol. This distinction, then, led to concerns about artifice in human behavior, both inside and outside the Ruist (Confucian) tradition. By end of the Warring States Period and in the early Western Han Dynasty, with the embracement of artifice in self-cultivation, the dramatic role of the filial son in death rituals became even more developed and complex, requiring the role of cultivated spectators to be engaged critics who recognized the nuances of cultivated performances.

The Great Divergence

This chapter demonstrates that it was in the hands of Mozi and his followers, the Mohists, as well as the self-professed followers of Confucius, especially Mencius and the Mencians, that the tension between humaneness and justice would receive full treatment in their effort to articulate their respective moral-political projects. As a consequence, the tension between the two norms would become increasingly glaring and could no longer be glossed over. The Mohists would fully embrace justice, whereas the Mencians would tout humaneness. The author calls such a development during the early to mid-Warring States period the “Great Divergence,” referring to the fact that the Mohists and the Mencians would gravitate toward justice and humaneness, respectively, and finding the tension between them hard to reconcile—even irreconcilable under certain circumstances. This pivotal divergence would drastically reshape the subsequent development of the moral-political discourse in the classical period and beyond.

Searching for the Way in Life: Yang Zhu’s Theory of Tending Life in Liezi

Known as a Taoist, Yang Zhuw lived in the Warring States Period. In his only transmitted work named ‘Yangzhu’in Liezi, he presented the “tending life” theory which was considered by most scholars as a sort of “hedonism,” “extreme egoism” or “indulgence.” However, the “tending life” theory should not be simply regarded as an avocation of physical enjoyment. First, ‘Yangzhu’ defined Tao（the Way） as a “weak power” which only assists things to “auto-generate” and “self-transform,” so that “tending life” is also a pursuit of the ultimate meaning of Tao. ‘Yangzhu’ further argued that the best way of “tending life” is not to restraint and suppress one’s natural desire, for the realization of “tending life” should be based on the preservation of the body. ‘Yangzhu’ discusses the relationship between the “Ming”(name/reputation) and the “Shi”(Reality), which reveal that the attachment to the “reputation” is the main obstacle of the realization of “tending life.” At last, Yang Zhu proposed that the most ideal life should “roaming as the nature prompt” through a dialectical discussion. Therefore, the theory of “tending life” also reflects a pursuit that to some extent transcends the physical life.

On the Nature of the Tsinghua Bamboo-Slip Manuscript Chi jiu zhi ji Tang zhi wu

The nature of the Tsinghua bamboo-slip manuscript Chi jiu zhi ji Tang zhi wu is different from that of the Yi Yin shuo, which is recorded in the ‘Zhuzi lüe’ of the Han shu ‘Yiwen zhi’. This manuscript is also not a story fabricated by people in the Warring States period. It is possible that what is presented in this manuscript was a legend passed from generation to generation within Yi Yin’s lineage. Unlike Yin zhi and Yin gao, this manuscript does not belong to the Shangshu category.

A Brief Description of the Anhui University Shi Jing Manuscript

In 2015, Anhui University acquired a valuable batch of bamboo manuscripts from the Warring States period. The Anda slips have received wide attention both abroad and in China, in particular the Shi jing manuscript contained therein. This article discusses the sequence, number, and variants of the songs, titles, wording, and phrasing in the Shi jing manuscript. The final section of this article introduces the philological value of this find.