With a serious scholar like Wang Guowei, in the past few years, he has repeatedly used "artistic conception" and "realm" as the benchmark for his commentary, poetry, and drama, what does this mean? Personally, I think that this situation reflects a process of development in his understanding. When he wrote "Human Words in the First Manuscript Preface" in 1906, although he had realized that in order to correct the shortcomings of the Qing Dynasty, he had not yet theoretically summarized the characteristics of the five dynasties of Northern Song poetry. In 1907, the Preface to the Second Draft of Human Words had a development in understanding, not only clearly marking "artistic conception" as the strength of the five dynasties of Northern Song Dynasty words, but also giving a certain explanation of this traditional concept. In 1908, when he wrote "Words in the World", he obviously wanted to establish a new theory in addition to the traditional "artistic conception", so he proposed the "realm". However, in his mind, it is not yet possible to clearly distinguish between "realm" and "artistic conception". For example, when he deliberately used the concept of "realm" in "Words of the World", he inadvertently used the concept of "artistic conception", and he saw such signs. ——Wang Wensheng, "A Preliminary Study of Wang Guowei's Literary Thoughts".
The essence of artistic conception, if summed up in one sentence, is "the environment is born outside the image".The artist's aesthetic object is not the "image", but the "environment". "Environment" is the unity of "virtuality" and "reality". Therefore, the category of "artistic conception" is not the same as the category of ordinary artistic images ("image"). "Artistic conception" is "image", but not all "image" is "artistic conception". The connotation of "artistic conception" is richer than that of "imagery". "Artistic conception" contains both the general provisions that "imagery" has in common, and also contains its own special provisions. Because of this, "artistic conception" is a unique category of classical Chinese aesthetics.
Let's look at Wang Guowei's realm again. We have analyzed the three meanings of Wang Guowei's so-called "realm" (or "artistic conception"): the first is to emphasize the integration and unity of feelings and scenes, images and images, and concealment and beauty; the second is to emphasize the real scenery and true feelings, that is, to emphasize the authenticity of the reproduction; The third is to emphasize the full and perfect communication of imagery in literary language, that is, to emphasize the direct image sense of literary language. Wang Guowei grasps these three aspects, and the three meanings he discusses and plays, are precisely the general prescriptiveness of "artistic conception" as an artistic image ("image"). The special prescriptiveness of "artistic conception" was completely set aside by him. Wang Guowei uses some Western aesthetic concepts to explain "artistic conception". But he failed to grasp the essence of the artistic conception theory. According to his interpretation, the category of "artistic conception" (or "realm") is equivalent to the category of the general artistic image, that is, it is equivalent to the category of "image", and is no longer a unique category. Therefore, if we do not stop at superficial terms, but look at the problem from the substance, then it should be said that Wang Guowei's realm theory does not belong to the scope of the artistic conception theory of classical Chinese aesthetics, but belongs to the scope of the image theory of classical Chinese aesthetics. ——Ye Lang, Outline of the History of Chinese Aesthetics