From ceramic materiality to animated visuality: Cross-media translation of traditional Chinese craft aesthetics

This article examines how ceramic aesthetics are translated into the visual language of Chinese animation. Through close readings of The Porcelain Doll, Geng Xue’s Mr. Sea, and The Ways in Patterns: An Immersive Digital Exhibition from the Palace Museum, it traces a spectrum from material presence to digital dematerialization, arguing that this transformation constitutes cross-media aesthetic translation. Drawing on remediation theory and haptic visuality, it reveals how ceramic materiality undergoes a dynamic process of dematerialization and rematerialization through animation’s medium-specific properties. The central finding concerns four dimensions’ differential translatability: glaze and texture resist digitization but can achieve visual equivalents through haptic visuality; form involves dimensional compression; pattern translates most readily but risks losing cultural context. These findings illuminate a structural tendency in the digital transmission of traditional Chinese aesthetics: dimensions readily encodable as graphic data are systematically over-represented, while those dependent on materiality and tactility are marginalised, with implications for how digital media shapes the cultural memory of material arts.