On Natural Emotional Sublimation Of Aesthetic Emotion

Emotion is the chief element of art, to some extent, there can be no art without emotion. Only the work saturated with esthetic emotion is the true work of art.In the daily life, emotion exists in a natural way, but only through the following three ways can it be elevated to a higher level—esthetic emotion in an art form.To achieve the elevation from natural emotion to esthetic emotion, one prerequisite is that the emotion must be aroused. To arouse the emotion, two conditions must be met. On the one hand, the arousing of the emotion originates from the stimulation of its object. On the other hand, the arousing of the emotion stems from the inner innate structure of the subject which exerts impact on the object.Another necessary condition for natural emotion to be elevated to esthetic emotion is the artists' reexperience of emotion. During this process, an artist such as a painter puts the chaotic and uncertain emotion into order and expands the range of the original emotion;he changes the regular but nonartistic emotion into new individualistic and art-conscious emotion;and he also transforms the superficial nonenlightening emotion into deep and meaningful emotion.The expression of emotion is another prerequisite for natural emotion to be elevated to esthetic emotion. There are three ways to achieve this purpose. One way is to put one's emotion into things. Through the objective depiction of a person or a scenery, an artist can put his strong feelings into them, and the reader can understand and feel the strong emotion carried in the work of art, thus his sympathetic response will be aroused. The second way is empathy, which means to put one's emotion into an object so that the two can be combined into one. The expression of the combination of emotion and object causes the viewer to be involved into the work and the viewer enters a special emotional world, and this is so called empathy. The third way is called the same structure with different quality. It means the artistic analogy and contrast of the artist's inner emotion and the outside scenery. The connection between the inner feelings and the outside object is given the term the same structure with different quality.In the author's opinion, only the esthetic emotion which is saturated with the philosophy of life can push the artistic creation forward and only through the experience of and reflection on the realistic work of art can we and our work of art form a world of our own and thus an appreciation and evaluation can be achieved. As artists, we do not attempt to burden art with emotion, but the art is the expression of emotion, and a true form of esthetic emotion at that.