Han Dynasty Art Of Narrative Research

"Narrative " painting practice is one of the artistic features in Han dynasty. Compared with the previous Chinese artistic tradition, the people in Han dynasty are good at conveying their political and ethic values through painting the historical stories, the true with their general understanding of the universe. This dissertation tries to study the "narration" of Han pictorial arts from the aspects of the story expression, conveyance of values, organization of the painting and the whole structure of the image.The detailed discussion is started from the representative case and developed from the issue of two aspects: one is about the narration itself, including the handling of the plots, human images, dynamic design and the scheduling of the positions in the picture, etc.. The relatively more important issue among them is the relation of transformation (and interaction) between visual arts and the historical texts. The second is laid behind the narration, including the abstract ideas and concrete psychological relationship between historical images and events, the social and historical reasons why they have been transformed into certain visual models in Han dynasty, and so on. All these problems lead to another problem, i.e. the exploration of the whole structure of images and its symbolism of Han Pictorial Arts. Through these discussions, the following conclusions can be reached:Han artists desire to and have the ability to describe historical stories, to express the ideas of universe, life and values. During the course of the artistic creation, they are quite familiar with the psychological indications of visual images and they are expert at sorting the messy materials into believable paintings. What is more, their purpose is to contracture the image of universe which can embody all. And this image system includes all the factors in Han's idea of universe. Eventually, the essential meaning of this universe image lies in the continuity between the universe image and the living world and in the "ecological" universe model which is formed by the fixed artistic images and their corresponding human beings.