APSIRI Research: The Dialogue of “Black” and “Color” in Lacquer Art and Painted Sculpture

Some of the most profound aesthetic ideas are carried not in words but in materials, surfaces, and colours. A new research outcome from the Asia-Pacific Social Innovation Research Institute (APSIRI), led by Ziyi Meng with Xianjie Zhao and Yiran Wang, examines a subtle and revealing relationship in traditional art: the dialectic between the “black” of lacquer art and the “colors” of painted sculpture.

At first glance, black and colour might seem to stand in simple opposition — one the absence of hue, the others its full presence. The study shows that the relationship is far richer. In lacquer art, black is not emptiness but depth: a profound, lustrous ground that holds light, suggests space, and gives the other elements of a work their resonance. In painted sculpture, colour is not mere decoration but a language of form, emotion, and meaning. Setting these two traditions side by side, the research reveals how each illuminates the other.

The analysis is dialectical in the precise sense: it explores how opposites define and complete one another. The black of lacquer gives colour its frame and its foil; colour gives black its purpose and its contrast. Neither is fully understood in isolation. By reading the two traditions together, the study uncovers a shared logic beneath their apparent difference — a logic in which restraint and abundance, depth and surface, ground and figure are held in productive tension.

This kind of close aesthetic reading is valuable for several reasons. It deepens appreciation of two distinct and demanding art forms, each the product of long traditions of craft and sensibility. It also contributes to aesthetic theory more broadly, offering a concrete case in which the abstract principle of dialectical relationship can be seen at work in material practice. And it preserves and renews cultural knowledge, articulating in careful terms what skilled artists have long understood intuitively.

The study’s significance extends beyond the specialist. Art forms such as lacquer and painted sculpture are repositories of cultural memory and human skill. Scholarship that takes them seriously — that explains their inner logic rather than treating them as mere objects — helps keep these traditions alive and intelligible to new generations and to audiences beyond their original context. In doing so, it contributes to the wider work of cultural understanding and exchange.

By bringing analytical rigour to questions of aesthetics, the research also models a way of writing about art that respects both its sensuous immediacy and its intellectual depth. The “black” of lacquer and the “colors” of sculpture become, in this reading, not just visual facts but ideas to be thought with.

This research reflects APSIRI’s support for scholarship that connects art, culture, and society. By valuing the careful study of cultural and aesthetic traditions, the Institute seeks to keep the full breadth of human creativity within the scope of serious inquiry, and to support the cross-cultural appreciation of artistic heritage.