A Study of the Sense of Ugliness in Chinese Classical Aesthetics from Confucian and Taoist Perspectives

Ugliness is not a category,but an ideology in Chinese classical aesthetics.The origin of ugliness is closely related to a sense of death.Different ideas about beauty and ugliness result from different opinions about life and death.Life and ethics are prior to death in Confucianism: they make the sense of ugliness absent or transfer to a sense of ethics.However,in the Taoist eye,to live or to die does not matter,thus presenting the sense of ugliness as a spirit of freedom,and beauty and ugliness transfer to each other too.