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Prominent in both the Eastern and Western visual traditions are pictures that display a certain kinds of pictorial objects -- canvases, statuettes, screens, hanging scrolls, altarpieces, and prints -- within their compositions. These pictures within pictures call our attention to several interesting epistemological questions. For instance, what are images and how do they work? In which context, to what purpose, and by whom are they created and used? How should we study them? This course is designed to find our own answers and formulate further questions from a new and distinctive angle: by examining the appearance of “images within images” across the East/West divide, and across the time periods ranging from the ancient to the modern era. What kinds of differences, and what kind of similarities, are to be found in the way cultures that are spatially and temporally remote from one another conceived the image? René Magritte’s Human Condition dated to 1933, for example, plays the idea with being inside and outside simultaneously, an ambiguity that can also be found in the eighteenth-century portrait of the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1735-1799) entitled “One or Two?” In Chinese mythology, multiple stories exist that may be compared to the ancient myth of Pygmalion: a representation of a beautiful woman suddenly becomes animated, acquiring real presence and enters into a relation with a male figure. Discussing such similarities or common ideas behind images from different cultures will help us delve deeper into the questions of how we perceive images and why we create and give meaning to them There will be a final paper.