The article by Robert Bagley concerns the topic of the ancient Chinese art and the transformations that it has encountered in the flow of the centuries. One of the central ideas expressed by the author is that the modern popular Chinese art form as we know it, with an essential symbolic of dragon image, is the result of the combination of the initially Chinese art tradition with the Near Eastern motives. This article proves that the idea of picturing the dragons derives from the distant past when the images were completely unlike the ones that people are accustomed to nowadays but that also was a creative basis for the motives that are being developed in the modern art.
The author of the article pays attention to the fact that the initial depiction of creatures on the Chinese bronze was a result of a different imaginary process and different relation to the real world animals. Nevertheless, according to the author, it was the Near Eastern influence that has actually contributed to the inclusion of some plant patterns in the art and the transformation of the initially two-dimensional ornament into the three-dimensional animal-like pieces of art. According to the article, the first images of what we now identify as dragon were created already in the Bronze Age. Still, those were the …show more content…
The tension and the power of drawing attention was something taken from the ancient time. It was supported by the creation of the three-dimensional vessels with the heads of unknown creatures by the Erligang artists and later used in combination of the native tradition and the art of the steppes where the dragons were already embodied and interacted with one another. This evocation of the living animals that are moving in the real space has become the quintessence of the modern Chinese