Crystallization and Dissolution: Reframing W.J.T. Mitchell’s “Art and Infinity” through the Ontologies of Chinese Aesthetics

The representation of "infinity" remains a central problematic in visual culture and ontological inquiry. In his essay "Art and Infinity," W.J.T. Mitchell utilizes the Infinite Cube as a heuristic to demonstrate how the Western aesthetic tradition "crystallizes" the boundless universe into a concrete physical object via geometric grids, optical reflection, and visual illusion. This endeavor to give rational form to the infinite highlights the exceptional constructive power of Western epistemology. However, when situated within a framework of cross-cultural mutual illumination, classical Chinese aesthetics offers a radically divergent, yet internally coherent, ontological pathway. Taking Mitchell’s discourse as a point of departure, this paper establishes a comparative theoretical coordinate system grounded in three core categories of Chinese aesthetics: Yuan (远, the ethereal extension of space-time and the affective projection of landscape), Kong (空, ontological emptiness and the generative matrix of all things), and You (游, the dissolution of the subject-object dichotomy through phenomenological wandering). This essay argues that, whereas the Western paradigm treats infinity as an object subject to external observation and spatial measurement, the Chinese tradition seeks to dissolve physical boundaries, transforming infinity into an affective, phenomenological field in which the subject dwells and ultimately merges. These divergent conceptualizations reveal that humanity possesses multiple, complementary epistemological strategies for confronting the boundless.