The Hopping Dead. Zombies in the Chinese Culture

The article examines the image of zombies in Chinese culture, the traditional perception of their appearance and internal characteristics. A wide scope of written sources served as the basis of the study: inscriptions on oracle bones, ancient fortune-telling calendars, historical treatises, chronicles and commentaries on chronicles, essays on geography and medicine, fiction of old and modern China, as well as entries and comments from the Chinese blogosphere. The authors examine how the idea of evil spirits (with a body or bodiless ones) first appeared in the religious worldview of the ancient Chinese, and trace its origin to the doctrine of existence of multiple souls in one person. The article also details the formation of the pictorial image of Chinese zombies: animated corpses covered with hair or dressed as government officials, with their arms extended forward, hopping on straight legs unable to bend their knees. As for the functional characteristics of zombies, the authors discuss not only their well-known features (e.g., cannibalism), but also their deep inner connection with water and drought. In conclusion, the authors explore the evolution of zombies in modern urban legends and demonstrate the continuity of traditional demonology that develops into modern narrative. Apart from that, the article contains a number of analogies and comparisons of the Chinese image of zombies with other nations’ mythological tradition.

Illusionism in sacred monumental painting of the baroque era, optics of perception

The investigation of the mechanisms of dual influence in a pair “work of art – viewer” opens up important opportunities for the worldview, cultural, aesthetic intentions laid down by the author(s), outlines the ways of transmitting the message to the recipient and assesses the effectiveness. The authors of this article analyse the practices of applying the mechanisms and principles of neuroaesthetics in the perception of baroque monumental paintings and the effects caused by the conscious use of illusory techniques in the duality of relationships. The authors of the article aim to find out the principles of the formation of cognitive and aesthetic connections expressed in specific formal principles-approaches, in the processes of perception of illusionistic baroque painting by the primary addressee-a person of the Baroque era – from the point of view of neuroaesthetics. The methodology refers to the implementing a multidisciplinary approach, based on the synthesis of cultural, anthropological and art research methods. To solve research problems and achieve results, we turn to the functional method and the modelling method, thanks to which defining effective models of interaction in the pair “work of art – recipient” and modes of functioning of consciousness when generating a pictorial image.

The Emblems of Sleep Societies in Asia and the Republic of Korea

An emblem is a symbolic representational image that stands for a certain organization, concept, team, or society. This study investigated the emblems of the sleep societies in South Korea and the international sleep societies in which they were registered as members. Three South Korean sleep societies were found by searching for the keyword ‘sleep’ in the Korea Citation Index. Subsequently, we identified three international societies in which the three South Korean conferences participate. The emblems can be classified according to their composition. Taegeuk patterns represent yin and yang, electroencephalography that stands for the objective indicator of sleep, and the acronym or abbreviation indicating the name of the society. All emblems in this study were combinations of pictorial images and letters. The pictorial image of the Korean Sleep Research Society is the only emblem representing an inset with Hangeul. The emblem is a medium that conveys diverse meanings beyond representation. The societies have attempted to embody the identity as well as their directions.

Felicia Hemans and the Birth of the Mass-Market Woman Poet

This chapter focuses the career of Felicia Hemans, one of the first women writers to achieve widespread fame as a mass-market poet. I begin with an overview of the revolution in print that corresponded with the span of Hemans’s career, 1808 to 1835. While Hemans’s poems might have made their first appearance in books or periodicals priced at one shilling or more, they were among the most frequently reprinted content in periodicals and newspapers aimed at broad audiences that included working-class and lower-middle-class readers. In the second part of this chapter, I use Hemans’s poem ‘The Better Land’ as a case study for exploring how the practice of reprinting enabled the dissemination of her work to mass-market audiences and niche readerships. In the third section of this chapter, I explore the history of American reprintings of Hemans’s poetry, highlighting how she negotiated the lack of international copyright protection for British authors in order to harness new markets abroad. I close the chapter by exploring a posthumously published poem, ‘To My Own Portrait.’ Its circulation in memorials after Hemans’s death tells us much about emergent visual print culture, which defined the ‘poetess’ as both a celebrity author and a pictorial image.

Del exceso óptico a la mirada cautiva: la imagen pictórica como “visible saturado” en la fenomenología del ídolo de Jean-Luc Marion

El propósito del presente artículo es mostrar el modo en el cual la hermenéutica del ídolo de Jean-Luc Marion, es decir, su fenomenología de la imagen pictórica, supone un paso adelante en la consideración de la teoría fenomenológica de la intuición. Las nociones de “admiración”, “detención de la mirada” o “mostración de lo invisto” cumplen, en este sentido, la función de poner de manifiesto cómo el cuadro logra mostrarse como un elemento visible en cuyo interior tiene lugar el acontecimiento de la apoteosis absoluta de la visión. Tal grado supremo de la mirada implica un cuestionamiento “estético” de las teorías metafísicas acerca del fenómeno artístico, a la vez que un desarrollo de las iniciales posiciones husserlianas en referencia a la constitución del objeto fenoménicamente dado.The aim of this paper is to show the way in which Jean-Luc Marion´s hermeneutics of the idol (that is, his phenomenology of pictorial image) involves a step forward in the consideration of phenomenological theory of intuition. The concepts of “admiration”, “pause of the gaze” or “exhibition of the unseen” accomplish, in this sense, the role of showing how a painting manages to appear as a visible element in whose interior the event of the absolute apotheosis of visión takes place. This supreme degree of the gaze implies an “aesthetical” questioning of metaphysical theories about artistic phenomenon and, at the same time, a development of the first husserlian positions in reference to the constitution of the phenomenomenically given object.

A Report on “Old Map Collection” by Geospatial Information Authority of Japan

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Historical maps are valuable resources to understand the topography, land use, and land cover of the country in the past. Recently they have been used as basic data in fields such as education, disaster prevention or research on local history. Geospatial Information Authority of Japan (GSI) has been working on collecting and archiving historical maps which were drawn before than Meiji period. However, public use of these maps is often confined because they are almost non-existent or have the possibility of being damaged. Therefore, in order for everyone to use these maps, GSI created a website “Old Map Collection” (Figure 1), which provides various digitized historical maps. In this presentation, we introduce the summary of “Old Map Collection” and some of its new contents.</p><p>In 2005 GSI created a website “Old Map Collection” to provide historical maps for public use as historical, cultural, and academic documents. Users can browse about 1,500 map sheets including various related information, e.g., name, size, date-of-creation, author, and pictorial image. Also all maps are categorized into 15 fields such as maps made in Meiji period, maps of Japan, world maps, and Ino’s maps, based on their age of publication, range of area, and purpose of use, which enables users to find maps more easily.</p><p>2018 marked the 150th anniversary since the beginning of Meiji period, when the modernization of Japan started. In order to bequeath the history of Meiji to future generations, Japanese government has promoted the policy named “MEIJI 150th”. One of the projects GSI conducted related to “MEIJI 150th” was the additional release of 1:20,000 scale original rapid survey map, e.g., Figure 2, on “Old Map Collection”. This map was created from 1880 to 1886 (the 13th -19th years of Meiji period) in advance of the national survey by General Staff Office of the Imperial Japanese Army, and is now owned only by GSI. It contains 921 colored map sheets which cover the area of capital Tokyo and its surrounding regions.</p>

Chen Hongshou's Laments

Historians of Chinese literature and philosophy have written extensively about the significance of emotion (qing 情) in late Ming times (1522–1644). But how did a pictorial image manifest emotion, and how were its visible signs of emotion conceptualized? This article considers the dilemma that painters faced in general when they represented an expressive body: How could the display of emotion in gesture and facial expression be contained within the bounds of propriety? The author examines, in particular, how Chen Hongshou 陳洪綬 (1598–1652) resolved this dilemma in two figural paintings, one of which represents a sorrowful woman, and the other, a worried drunkard. She argues that Chen's representation of sorrow and anxiety was inextricably tied to the pictorial conventions utilized by the print designers of his day to illustrate dramatic, emotionally charged moments in a story. Hence, Chen animated the actors in his paintings with emphatic gestures and poses, complementing their expressive bodies with more subtly shaped facial features. But Chen's incorporation into his painting of what was at the time readily identified as “print” disturbed his figural compositions. As much as the expressive figures aroused an empathetic response from his viewers, the juxtaposition of incompatible manners of representation also made his work seem strange and preposterous. However, Chen's visual laments were derived from poems and historical anecdotes. The author argues that the verbal texts to which he alluded not only enhanced and justified his viewers' empathetic response to his paintings but also enabled him to delineate emotions that were otherwise eschewed by the painters of his time.