Spatiality and Visuality of Mythical Objects: Remaking Chinese Myths in Digital Culture

In contemporary multimedia landscape, a new breed of ancient myths has emerged, earning widespread popularity. Building upon traditional mythical narratives, popular culture in the digital age has innovatively expanded and reimagined the mythical space, continually shaping and reshaping individual and collective consciousness. This chapter delves into two digital recreations of popular mythical objects in Chinese folklore traditions, the Pot in the animation Goose Mountain (2023), and the Mirror in the video game Tales of the Mirror (2021). This research examines the spatiality of these modern retellings in three layers: the visualisation of the strangeness, the spatial structure of narratives, and the metaphysical reflection of the self-journey. Central to the construction of mythical space, rooted in textual and archaeological materials and extended to the digital landscape, are the mythical objects. Hence this chapter studies the visuality of Pot and Mirror, particularly in digital narratives, to examine how they redirect audience’s gaze towards the self. The mythical Pot spits out and swallows back the hidden self, the mythical Mirror swallows one’s sight and rebounds one’s image. The digital gazing pattern between the viewer, the mythical object, and the other (or the unknown self) is formed, and through repetition, it strengthens the consciousness of the otherness in the self. Mythical objects as the instrument, audience return to ancient traditions, and return to one’s newly recognised self, and in meta-return the self reaffirms the intrinsic self.