Artistic conception is an important category in China's classical aesthetic tradition, and China's classical poems, paintings, essays, poems, calligraphy, music, architecture and operas all attach great importance to artistic conception.

Artistic conception is a realm of blending scenes in art and an organic unity of subjective and objective factors in art.. The artistic conception includes both the artist's subjective emotion and the objective reality. Emotion and environment are organically integrated, and there is emotion in the environment and emotion in the environment. Artistic conception is the product of subjective emotion and objective scenery, and it is the unity of emotion and scenery, meaning and environment.

(2) Characteristics of artistic conception

① Artistic conception is a kind of hazy beauty

Artistic conception first appeared as an ethereal realm in literature and art. In China's traditional philosophy and artistic thought, reason and sensibility, spirit and matter, metaphysics and metaphysics are always interdependent and interrelated, and they are always in a high degree of unity at different levels. In the realm of China's traditional art, it is divided into two parts: virtual and real.

The virtual and the real can be said to be the distinction between the two elements that constitute the aesthetic object in China's traditional aesthetics, namely, the mind and the object, the emotion and the scene, the meaning and the image, the spirit and the shape, etc. Generally speaking, the former is virtual, and the latter is real. The real part of artistic conception exists in pictures, words, music and imaginary images; The imaginary part, that is, the important or essential part of artistic conception exists in imagination and perception.

② Artistic conception is a kind of transcendental beauty from limited to infinite

China's traditional aesthetics and art theory pursue a kind of "meaning beyond rhyme" or "meaning beyond taste". In the Wei and Jin Dynasties, Wang Bi put forward the idea of "forgetting words with images and forgetting images with pride", that is, trying to break through the finiteness of words and images and pursue the infinity of meaning. China's classical poetry pursues implication, Chinese classical music pursues implication, and China's classical painting pursues feelings beyond painting, all of which aim to achieve infinite artistic conception through limited artistic images.

The reason why artistic conception has a strong artistic appeal is that artists of past dynasties have grasped the poetic features of natural images, fused lovers' scenes and conveyed feelings through scenes, making these natural images more subjective and emotional, achieving the blending of scenes and the combination of reality and fiction, producing endless charm, and enabling the appreciator to comprehend infinite artistic implications from the limited artistic images.

③ Artistic conception is a kind of natural beauty

There have always been two kinds of beautiful ideals in the history of Chinese aesthetics, one is the beauty of "wrong choice of gold, dazzling carving", and the other is the beauty of "budding hibiscus, natural and lovely". The emotion in the artistic conception is "the emotion in the scene", and the scene in the artistic conception is "the scene in the emotion". Subjective emotion is reflected in the objective image, and artistic meaning is contained in the artistic image. It is an artistic realm created by the artist's skills. Only when emotion and scene are in harmony and highly unified can an organic artistic whole be formed.