Goguryeo ancient tomb murals in Ji'an: Cultural Identity and Representation from the Perspective of Visual Culture

Abstract

This research is a thematic study that takes murals in ancient tombs of Goguryeo in Ji'an as the research object, focuses on analysing the reasons for their formation as well as their artistic characteristics, and aims at revealing their artistic value and cultural significance. From the perspective of art, this study collects data from six ancient tombs of Goguryeo mural paintings in Ji'an with the help of art archaeological data, compares and analyses them with ancient tomb mural paintings in different regions in the same period, and makes use of iconographic, survey and documentary methods to conduct the study, standing from the perspective of anthropology, through the perspective of visual culture research, and applying the concepts of cultural identity and representation to explore the origins and changes of the Goguryeo mural paintings in Ji'an, and the relationship between Goguryeo culture and the Central Plains. origin and change, and the relationship between Goguryeo culture and Central Plains culture.

This research adopts qualitative research method. Through the perspective of visual culture research, it analyses the artistic characteristics of the murals of the ancient tombs of Goguryeo in Ji'an and finds the cultural identity from the murals, both the identity of the Goguryeo murals to the murals of the Central Plains, and the identity of the Goguryeo culture to the culture of the Central Plains. Also through the perspective of visual culture research, the representation of Goguryeo culture in the murals of Goguryeo tombs in Ji'an is analysed to further validate the cultural identity of Goguryeo culture to the culture of the Central Plains, which is also the most important research purpose of this thesis.

Overall, from the perspective of visual culture, the murals of Goguryeo tombs in Ji'an are not only a form of visual art, from which it can be seen how the ancients used images as a medium of information dissemination to express their ideas, but also an important carrier of Goguryeo cultural identity and social representations. This study provides us with a new perspective to understand and interpret Goguryeo tomb murals, and offers a new theoretical foundation and practical perspective for future research in related fields.

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