Metaphors We Live By
2024.8.17 - 2024.9.15
Opening hours: Tuesday-Sunday 10:30-18:30
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"At the origin of language, almost every word was a metaphor, every phrase a metaphor." — Concetto
A metaphor, using analogy and association, creatively compares one thing to another. As a rhetorical device, its deeper essence lies in the way we perceive and understand things, forming the conceptual foundation of our language, thoughts, and actions.
Life's journey is a metaphor, the halfway point on a mountain is a metaphor, a showerhead is a metaphor, and "big fool" is a metaphor. Our daily lives are filled with metaphors. We understand new things by connecting them with the old. Linking two things across time and space is itself a creative intellectual activity. The unraveling of the world's mysteries began with the association triggered by an apple falling.
In art, people emphasize the artist's autonomous creativity, believing that art arises from imagination while undervaluing association. The motivation for creating art is to construct an overall metaphorical world in order to understand the real world. Myths stem from the associations within the human world, and dreams use daily life as their subject matter.
Art, in general, is a world of imagery, where the creation of images is a metaphor for reality. It can be said that at the origin of art, every image was a metaphor. Some of these metaphors are successful (vivid images), while others fail (less vivid). Some become clichés, while others remain fresh and full of vitality. The world of artistic imagery lies in the continuous creation of novel metaphors and the renewal of old ones.
The world of artistic imagery once included pictorial symbols, which gradually became abstract and evolved into the carriers of language. Language, through abstract symbols, continues to metaphorically represent the world. Today's development of art integrates imagery and semantics, reconnecting the two. Imagery and semantics, imagery and reality, semantics and reality — metaphors flow freely among them.
