The Aesthetics of Pictorial Art

December 2, 2020

In this seminar, our research consultant Huai-An Hsing (National Yang Ming University, Master of Philosophy of Mind and Cognition) discusses the aesthetics of pictorial arts. A pictorial art was defined as a two-dimensional visual work whose main function is to provide aesthetic experience, including not only traditional categories within visual arts such as painting and photography, but also graphic design, which is rarely addressed in contemporary philosophical aesthetics.

Taking Italian Renaissance paintings as the object of his philosophical analysis, Huai-An Hsing explained the common structure of the aesthetic experience of pictorial arts. After exploring the view that we could understand the creation of painting and graphic design with similar frameworks, he focused on the artistic practice of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio so as to develop a way to explicate the aesthetic value of pictorial arts. By virtue of delineating an approach to analyze the aesthetics of painting, a possible method to establish the aesthetic theory of graphic design was sketched out.

Published: December 2, 2020. Last Updated: August 16, 2022.