Taoist Philosophy in Chinese Science Fiction: A Comparison between Zhuangzi and Broken Stars

Chinese science fiction has been attaining global visibility since Liu Cixin’s trilogy entitled Remembrance of Earth’s Past. The trilogy’s English translator Liu Yukun has edited and rendered a science-fiction anthology that comprises sixteen novellas composed by fourteen Chinese novelists. Apart from a fecundity of imagination and richness of imagery-evoking depictions, narratives compiled in the anthology also epitomise Taoist philosophy conveyed in Zhuangzi, a Warring States (475-221 BC) treatise ascribed to an illustrious philosopher Zhuangzi. Philosophical constructs in the anthology can be exemplified by quintessential construals such as ‘non-action’, ‘resting in destiny’ and ‘self-so’, as well as mindset appertaining to temporal and aesthetic issues.

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.