The answer to breaking down the artificial barriers between literary and artistic categories is as follows:

Media in different eras and different civilizations are closely related to the development of art. Media and art The relationship is also a basic issue in art research.

From the perspective of art history, the writing of traditional Chinese art history is influenced by traditional Chinese poetry criticism, book criticism, painting criticism, poetry theory, literary theory, calligraphy and painting theory, music theory, and biographies. Influenced by other writing modes, it shows the writing characteristics of taking media category as the boundary, taking specific characters as the main line, and using taste as the main feature. On this basis, the research on traditional Chinese art categories has achieved certain results and progress.

Writing general art history requires transcending categorical art history and achieving a combination of cross-fertilization and integration. In the complex research on traditional Chinese art history, calligraphy and painting have always played an irreplaceable role. How to integrate calligraphy and painting with music, dance, opera and other art forms, and establish the boundaries of materials and issues that can be dealt with when writing the history of traditional Chinese art, is an important part of establishing the independent status of traditional Chinese art history.

Writing cross-media art history requires further exploring the legitimacy of writing cross-media art history. From the perspective of the nature of art, the uniqueness of artistic thinking lies in the principle of similarity in its connotations; from the perspective of artistic creation and art appreciation, sensory synaesthesia guided by the artistic soul can travel between different categories of art. ; Judging from the material media of art, different materials can be transformed into each other.

As a way for early humans to understand and interpret the world, art has formed a mutually mirroring relationship with the development of human thinking in the process of development. The classification of modern art categories is usually based on one or more classification principles, but classifying things into categories is the product of scientific empirical thinking.

The inner thinking of similarity is one of the main principles of art, and its symbol system is opposed to the arbitrariness of linguistic symbols. Modern linguistics starting from Saussure emphasizes the arbitrary connection of language signs. He regards language as arbitrary signs, because the link between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary, and the sign is the union of the signifier and the signified. The whole formed is therefore arbitrary.

But Saussure also believes that onomatopoeia and interjections and other musical marginal words are not completely arbitrary symbols. Jacobson gave language a broader poetic space between its sound, shape, and meaning. Jacobson proposed a duality theory of language symbols, that is, metaphors are produced on the aggregation axis of language, and metaphors are produced on the combinatorial axis of language. produces metonymy. Metaphor is based on a principle of similarity, and is therefore poetic, romantic, and imaginative.

Visual vision is one of the most important human senses and an important form of artistic expression. It is also closer to the thinking of similarity. If language is closer to an auditory art, then painting is a visual art. British art historian John Berger proposed in "The Way of Seeing" that "seeing precedes speech" and "it is seeing that establishes our position in the world around us;

We use words to explain that world, but Language cannot erase the fact that we are surrounded by a world”. For art forms such as painting and calligraphy, it is an art of viewing. It precedes language and cannot be explained clearly by language. However, the imagination and expressive power of art can transcend the expression boundaries of language and achieve something closer to art. own realm.