A Study On The Visualization Of Ghosts And Gods In Chinese Mythology

ghosts-gods legend is an important part of a country's and a nation's traditional culture which cannot be ignored.It is also the cultural crystallization of a country and a nation formed during the long history.Although the images of ghosts and gods look preposterous,they give us a sense of charm and mystery.The images are free and vague with rich patterns of manifestation,which can be existed as symbols or can contain symbolic value.In such a long-standing country like China,the number of ghosts-gods legends are vast,but only a few have been visualized such as Dragon.Phoenix and Zhong Kui,and the vast majority of images are written only in words,lacking in pictorial forms.Or the pictorial forms are not unified and also not popularized,and neither are the images of gods among different nations.Moreover,the mythic images presented in form of paintings cannot are no match for the figurative paintings in vast western mythological and religious themes.From the paintings on silk of Warring States,to Gu Kaizhi's “Lo River Map” of the Easter Jin Dynasty,to Wu Daozi's legendary paintings in Tang Dynasty,whose authentic copies are no longer available now,to Luo Pin in Qing Dynasty who relatively concentrated on ghosts and gods as his subjects of creation,those works are as sparse as morning stars compared with thousands of years of Chinese history and tens of thousands of ghost legends.When oil painting was introduced into China,there are few such subjects.At the present moment,when the nationalization of oil paintings is strongly promoted,ghosts-gods legends,the essence of national culture,are rarely used as subjects of creation,which is a kind of cultural invisibility and is mournful.This paper will focus on visualization and explore the reasons for the relative lack of ghost images in Chinese paintings and the possibility of creation in painting,especially in oil painting.