Relating Tradition to Innovation within Chinese Art

Digital technology brings great impact to art creation as well as a gap between traditional art and modern society. Finding the link between traditional and the modern has been a focusing issue in some countries such as China. In order to make a contribution to this process, this study focuses on the potential of digital media in the context of traditional visual art, in particular on Chinese literati painting. This helps to create the connection between the older idea and more modern thinking. TRADITIONAL ART CONCEPT IN A DIGITALISE ERA Every art form emerges relying on the development of society and technology at the time. Digital arts appeared along with the development and popularity of computer technology. Although the earliest digital artwork can be dated back to the 1960s, it was after the Apple Computer Company invented the Macintosh desktop publishing (DTP) system in the 1980s, that the digital arts field started to gain more and more attention. [1]. The development of digital technology drove more artists to integrate their artistic talent with digital techniques and depart from the conventional disciplines to use computer-based technology while computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) became more developed and popular. While digital technology is showing its ability to support industrial and commercial design, its unique visual presentation language has also been adopted in some artists’ art works. Digital technique brings excitement and visual novelty to artists. At the same time, because of cultural and technical differences, it shows some disadvantages in showing the same expression and emotion as the traditional visual arts, such as paintings. There are some misconceptions in both digital art and in Chinese traditional art, and because of this, it seems that digital arts can only work for certain themes and have no relationship to traditional art concepts. Through study of the cultural origins of traditional art, the potential for developing visual presentation and a sense of the aesthetic in the digital arts, as well as forming a bridge with the traditional arts, can be defined by adopting some fundamental delineations, colours, and cultural elements such as painting objects with recognised meanings. Using traditional arts, especially the literati art concept to enrich digital artwork content and taking into account the tradition of literary achievement to fill the cultural gap in relation to the digital arts, these are the most logical ways of presenting Chinese traditional beauty in cyberspace. As the title of