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Reclaiming The Body: Francis Bacon's Fugitive Bodies And Confucian Aesthetics On Bodily Expression, Eva K. W. Man

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Recently there has been a cry in Western academic and artistic circles for reclaiming the body and repositioning its locus and identity. Body theories and body art have become topics of attention as well as subjects of philosophical discussion. This article looks at the issue from a comparative perspective, focusing on representative cases in Chinese and Western portrait paintings. It first discusses Francis Bacon's works of human bodies and identifies their philosophical and psychological loci. It then outlines the Confucian discourses on the body, their related metaphysical grounds, and their relations to traditional Chinese portrait paintings. Representative Chinese portraits like …