Background
Zong Baihua was born in 1897 in Changshu, Jiangsu, China.
宗白华
Syncretist of Chinese and Western Aesthetics poet
Zong Baihua was born in 1897 in Changshu, Jiangsu, China.
Shanghai Tongji University. Universities of Frankfurt and Berlin, Germany (1920-1925).
Professor, Southeast University, Suzhou, Jiangsu Province. Professor, Central University. Professor, Nanjing University. 1949-1952, Professor. University of Beijing. Consultant. Chinese National Society of Aesthetics.
Zong was an outstanding Chinese poet of the 1920s who also developed a compelling aesthetic theory. As a poet he helped to originate contemporary Chinese poetry. In the 1920s he was a leader of the Young People’s China society, to which Mao Zedong also belonged. Zong employed the austere contrasts of fulfilment and emptiness and of the limited and unlimited to structure his account of aesthetics. He was deeply influenced by his studies in Germany and was especially drawn to the works of Goethe. His work on Kant encouraged his own high level of abstraction in his aesthetic thinking. He saw similarities between the notion of fulfilment and Goethe’s spirit of progression, but also saw in Goethe's writings the deep aesthetic understanding which can arise from emptiness. In Goethe, he criticized the tragic Faustian movement from the limited to seek the unlimited.
His account of Chinese artistic spirit also stressed fulfilment and emptiness, but in Chinese art he saw a capacity to unite the limited and the unlimited. In this regard he was particularly interested in the aesthetics of the metaphysical school of the Wei and Jin dynasties. He returned repeatedly to consider the problem of the relationship between aesthetic conception and space in Chinese art. He saw space in Chinese art as representing a unity between limited men and limitless nature and traced this conception of men, space, nature and the universe to philosophical sources in daoism and the Book of Changes.