Abstract: The study of haptics in art has a long tradition. Among the critical theories of visual culture, haptic theory has grown into an emerging and generally influential new knowledge. On the one hand, it advocates that contemporary art, especially cross-media art, should make full use of the sense of touch other than the sense of vision to improve multidimensional aesthetic and meaning construction. As a result, relevant researches have been widely supported by phenomenological theories. On the other hand, in more special forms of visual art such as cinema, haptic research is no longer confined to aesthetic and meaning construction. Rather, it attempts to establish an ontology of film oriented to the sense of touch rather than vision. Benefiting from phenomenological theories, haptic theory tries to develop a new ontology completely different from subject/ language theories by resorting to such concepts as“film body,”“film skin,”and“haptic vision”. This attempt, hardly separated from the overall trend of anti-rationalism and anti-metaphysics, has a certain epistemological value in advancing the critique visual culture, but the fallacies, the defects of media analysis, and the limitations of interpretation in the theory make it difficult to undertake the task of reconstructing film ontology. There is no universal and consistent haptic phenomenon in art, so it is difficult for haptic theory to cross the boundaries between art categories and media, not to mention becoming an ontology of art with theoretical homogeneity.

Key words: haptic, sense of touch, film ontology, cross-media art, contemporary art