| Summary: | 博士 === 國立政治大學 === 哲學系 === 107 === Art studies used to believe that art is centered around the idea of the beautiful, but since the time of the Avant-garde this has changed. Lyotard's theory suggests an alternative: the sublime. It is a great advantage of Kantian aesthetics that it can suggest such an alternative center. How well this new center functions is a different question. It was tailored for Western art on the basis of Western thought, but contemporary art faces global challenges of non-western aesthetic values.
This thesis uses a transition to the aesthetics of the sublime as a model for the Avant-garde art of Taiwan. In the introduction to the thesis an exposition of the elements of this model is given: what is Avant-garde art, what is Kant's theory of the sublime and how is Kant's theory applied to Avant-garde art according to Lyotard and others. The first chapter presents the background of the sublime aesthetics in Taiwan. A brief exposition of the Taiwanese art world before the 60s is given. The second chapter demonstrates the model and how it works on the material of Taiwanese Avant-garde of the 60s. The end of the aesthetics of the sublime is presented in the last chapter.
How is the sublime aesthetics operating in Avant-garde art? One of the important moments of sublimity for Kant is the mind's ability to grasp the object conceptually while being overwhelmed by it regarding the limits of the senses. The object felt to be sublime is too big or too forceful. For Kant, this is why the pyramids of Egypt are so fascinating for human beings. This feeling is called the mathematically sublime. In the Black Square (1915) by Malevich this ability of the mind can find an ideal object for practice: the viewer is exposed to an endless space of blackness from one side of the frame to another. Traditionally, the painting is a window to a particular world. The Black Square is like a window to the universe of darkness. That is the reason why the Black Square can produce a sublime feeling in a sensitive viewer. For such a viewer the Black Square looks like a tremendous abyss.
In Taiwanese Avant-garde art Malevich's square finds an interesting equivalent in Li Yuan-Jia's (李元佳) point. Li Yuan-Jia was interested in this graphical element, which at the same time is a concept in mathematics. Both Malevich and Li Yuan-Jia used their signature forms of abstract art, a square and a point, to refer to the absolute. During its first exhibition, Malevich puts the Black Square in a sacred place of the traditional Russian house – in a red corner, where house icons are supposed to be. Li Yuan-Jia builds on Daoist symbolism to ground his own 'Cosmic Point', as critics call it. The stability of the Black Square, the way it is filled with color from border to border contrasts with the elusiveness of the point, for which, as geometry supposes, real size stands for no size at all. A point, to quote Euclide, “is that which has no part.” The contrast between the square and the point finds itself in parallel with the fundamental distinction of Western and Chinese styles of thinking: the world as something permanent or as endless change. The thesis illuminates the reasons which lead to the differences and the similarities of Li's point and Malevich's square.
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