The three-dimensional conception of the Chinese culture

The illustration above showing a scene of the concubines’ daily lives gives us an impression that they are having fun by making up a party and playing music .The event maybe took place in the palace chamber of the imperial court of the Tong Dynasty and the neutral ground of the picture keeps us focusing at the green oblong table which all the resplendently dress-up ladies were sitting around. The presentation of the table refutes our visual experience. The farther end of the table is longer then the frontal side.

If we apply three-dimensional space to visual representation, the conception of a converging world would impart its own characteristic expression. The painting will establish rather direct connection between the events in the picture space and the viewer with its central perspective. We continue to look into the illusive pictorial space, and our eye sights will focalize to a point of emptiness. When arriving at such focal point, the feeling of plunging into nothingness really makes one feel uneasy. Especially Chinese culture adores vitality and the life force, so the abyss of treacherous unknownness is not what we want.

The divergent shape of the table worked out as an elementary device of spatial representation to enhance the feeling of substantial existence. Chinese culture express the perceptual world in the centerless continuum by isometric perspective. Moreover, the average Chinese people love happy ending; we don’t like the tragedy of love story; therefore in many famous Chinese operas, when the actress died, her soul could go into another newly dead body to continue the love story. Another example is that a lover died for their misconstruction of mutual communication. The other lover committed suicide for it. The ending is that they both incarnated into butterflies fluttering their wings gracefully away. Death ended the love story of Romeo and Juliet, and maybe this is the different concept of life between Chinese and the Western.