Aestheticism In The Artistic Background

As a worldwide trend of thought in literature and art, aestheticism had a great influence on Chinese literature since the May4th Movement. Just like the aestheticism masters, there was a group of young people who were well in both art and writing, in which Teng Gu, Ni Yide and Ye Lingfeng may be seen as typical examples.In the1920s, they showed the aesthetic tastes and artistic pursuit of aestheticism from the aspects of art and literature, advocated the art non-utilitarian theory, the agreement of poem and painting, the spirit of self-expression, and then developed their own theory and ideas of art. These three writers reflected the writing techniques and skills of the aestheticism art in their literary works.Most of their novels tried to obscure the emptiness of young intellectuals’spirit world, their desire to love and sexual appetite. Despite the relatively narrow scenes of life and the spirit of the pattern, their self-catharsis were full of emotional depth and expressive power, and the psychological descriptions also involved the exploration and disinterment of humanity. The works of Ni Yide were light and agile as the ink painting in style, while TengGu’s novels were peculiar and poignant. Compared with the two predecessors, Ye Lingfeng’s novels were delicate and charming, such like the traditional Chinese realistic painting. They maintained the preferences of aestheticism which focus on female body, showing the complex emotions of a fascination and disgust, they also depicted the images of women who have dual characteristics. They used writing skills to transform space with the clues of dream, using a stereoscopic techniques to show the mood of the plane, which can be described as a combination of painting and novels. They use the typical images of aestheticism to add the expressiveness of the works.Overall, the three writers tried to follow the spirit of aestheticism, and some experimental in techniques are meaningful. But their perception and practice were not entirely closely related, but had some difference. It is worthwhile to discuss the problem, and the variation of aestheticism in the specific social and cultural environment of the1920s China may be one of the reasons.