The Translated Visuality: The Shaping of Visual Experiences in China, 1615-1895

The current project aims to describe how cultural metaphorical system has taken effect in the shaping and representation of visual experiences in literary texts of different genres since the introduction of Western visual devices into China in late 16th century. For the past decade, visual modernity, highly related to the introduction of the Western visual devices such as cameras and movies, has become an important issue in the literary and cultural studies in the early Republic era. Scholars focuses mainly on how the visual experience brought about by the new visual devices has impacted on the traditional visual experience in China, and how this impact influenced a break and changes in the responding literature and cultural production. However, such research has addressed the questions as though there is only one universal idea of visual modernity. It is commonly assumed that new visual experiences would either be completely rejected as incompatible, or would completely replace outdated modes of visual experience. In fact, the problem of visual modernity is not nearly this simple. From the standpoint of cultural translation, before any new concepts can appear, they must first be interpreted through a known epistemological framework to be introduced and accepted, thus creating a new meaning in response to the given historical environment. Starting from this point, I intend to explore the traditional metaphoric elements and epistemological framework behind the formulation of Chinese visual modernity through analyzing the origin and process of the representation and creation of visual devices and visual experiences in narrative texts during the 16th and 19th centuries.