Geographical Imagery, Sacrality, and Cultural Identity: the Regong Thangka of Qinghai Through the Humanistic Geography Lens of Yi-Fu Tuan

YuhanYe, Aike Kan, Xiao Yang, Jikun Zhang, Laijiacuo Chen

Abstract

As the special aesthetic form Tibetan Buddhism, Thangka has constructed the sacredness in flux through the continuity of aesthetic form, ecological concepts and social functions. In this paper, taking Regong Thangka as an example, explained how religious art building connection between true self and imaginary world through its creation and use, and achieving a balance between local value and sacred attribute, thereby carrying and sustaining the collective memory and cultural identity of a community upon the perspectives of Yi-Fu Tuan's humanistic geography. The construction of geographical imagery is essentially a transformation from space to place. Religious doctrines and liturgical rites serve as the carrier for the utopian spiritual world, while the application of native natural and cultural resources enables the transformation of topophilia. A ternary mutual construction relation involving geographical imagery, sacrality, and cultural identity was proposed, which portrayed a symbiotic structure of Thangka cultural ecosystem containing the environment shaping cultural identity, art imbues geography with meaning, and cultural identity feeds back into and amplifies cultural dissemination. Thangka painters transform the physical space into a sacred spiritual place with religious meaning, while practitioners enter a ritualized place from an image space. The above findings respond to and bridge the theoretical viewpoints put forward by Yi-Fu Tuan including space and place, escapism and topophilia, thereby providing a new perspective for interpreting religious cultural heritages represented by Thangka.

Keywords

Regong ThangkaHumanistic GeographyYi-Fu TuanCultural identity

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