A Window to Chinese Art: Translating Concepts and Culture in Auspicious Chinese Painting

According to a recent survey, China overtook the United States by taking 33 percent of total sales in the global art market with a turnover of US$3 billion in 2010, and Qi Baishi's 'Eagle Standing on Pine Tree' with a four-character couplet in seal script was sold at US$65 million. With the robust demand for Chinese art, Chinese paintings with auspicious imagery are apparently well-received, and interpretative references in English are perceived to be important communicative tools for the Western world to understand Chinese painting. Auspicious imagery constitutes a unique element of the Chinese art and culture, and its visual tradition extends from the folk art of the Han dynasty to various media hitherto including advertising nowadays. This paper aims to focus on the understanding of auspicious Chinese painting and explore how an artist externalises his perception of an auspicious and propitious motif through the manipulation of brushstroke and visual representation of the related imagery within the Chinese culture; and to investigate further how a cross-cultural communicator should deconstruct the association embedded in the linguistic connotations and visual representation, and transfer with different approaches the underlying semiotic implication of a related motif. Such elucidation encapsulating the concepts and aesthetics of Chinese painting will exhibit cultural and linguistic insight into Chinese culture and art.