Resumen de How Is the Past in the Present?
The writer responds to Jonathan Hay's article, in this issue, on the role of mediation in an artwork, specifically in the painting A Solitary Temple below Brightening Peaks (Qingluan xiaosi). Hay's article engages in continual play on the words “medium” and “mediation.” Moreover, although it is not framed in these terms, Hay's treatment of medium seems to be a running critique of the formalist assumption that medium always conditions representation and is always, therefore, a means of expression, transparent to those sensitive to its ways. Hay's semiotic position neutralizes such expression. Still, his article offers a considerable quotient of inference from something like formal analysis.
