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Abstract

This dissertation critically reevaluates the preserved pictorial material in the tombs and grottoes of the Six Dynasties period, with the aim of restoring the original context of the Six Dynasties by clarifying the misconceptions about the relationship between images and space that are prevalent in the discourse of Chinese art history. From the viewpoint of this dissertation, an important reason why some misunderstandings have persisted in the narrative of Chinese art history for a long time is that the concepts of “image” and “space” have not been thoroughly investigated in their original cultural context. Therefore, before analyzing specific pictorial materials from the Six Dynasties period, this dissertation first returns to the original context of the Six Dynasties in the first part to conduct a basic investigation of the concepts of “image” and “space” formed by the people of the Six Dynasties. It attempts to restore some of the basic understanding of image and space at that time. In Chapter 1, the discussion revolves around the “image” and is based on the original context of the Six Dynasties, examining some special properties attributed to images during this era. The essential differences between different images referred to as “image (tu圖)” in the Chinese context, are delineated. Chapter 2 mainly investigates the basic knowledge about space accumulated by people at that time and their different understandings of it. Chapter 3 focuses on the spatial vocabulary system used during the Six Dynasties period, with particular emphasis on examining how people of this period used these spatial terms in artistic criticism. The second part of the dissertation delves into the more specific context of Six Dynasties art, building upon the basic restoration of the original context established in the first part. Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 deal respectively with the original context of the tombs and the cave-temples during the Six Dynasties period, with the aim of restoring as far as possible the various relationships between the images and their original users rather than modern viewers. In this more specific context, the relationship between image and space is reexamined, revealing different modes of pictorial expression in different situations.