Tieying Zhou

I am an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural scholar currently working on developing a theory of aesthetic appreciation by integrating case studies from both Western and Eastern art history. My current research focuses on the idea of aesthetic experience, integrating it into the context of comparative cultural studies. In my dissertation, to develop a coherent picture of aesthetic appreciation, I propose a perceptual account of defining artworks, then offer an evolutionary interpretation of aesthetic engagement, and conclude my investigation with a perceptual distance account based on my innovative reconstruction of Edward Bullough’s distance theory. This explains how it is possible to appreciate artworks from different eras and cultures.