Daoist Aesthetics of the Everyday and the Fantastical

This chapter focuses on the classical Daoist text, the  Zhuangzi , an extremely important text for sources and influences on Chinese art and aesthetics. It explores several metaphors and images in the text in order to think through Daoist aesthetics in terms of the everyday, the mundane, and the ordinary, and in terms of the fantastical, the bizarre, and the extraordinary. It then discusses these aesthetic ideas in connection with Daoist practices of self-cultivation, including especially a focus on the use of art practices such as calligraphy as forms of cultivation. This theme is developed further by thinking through ways in which Daoist aesthetics evoke the idea of an artful life, rather than art  qua  art.