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This innovative book narrates the history of a single object--a tea-leaf storage jar created in southern China during the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries--and describes how its role changed after it was imported to Japan and passed from owner to owner there. In Japan, where the jar was in constant use for more than seven hundred years, it was transformed from a humble vessel into a celebrated object used in chanoyu (often translated in English as tea ceremony), renowned for its aesthetic and functional qualities, and awarded the name Chigusa. Few extant tea utensils possess the quantity and quality of the accessories associated with Chigusa, material that enables modern scholars and tea aficionados to trace the jar's evolving history of ownership and appreciation. Tea diaries indicate that the lavish accessories--the silk net bag, cover, and cords--that still accompany the jar were prepared in the early sixteenth century by its first recorded owner.
From its origins as a distinct set of ritualised practices in the sixteenth century to its international expansion in the twentieth, tea culture has had a major impact on artistic production, connoisseurship, etiquette, food, design and more recently, on notions of Japaneseness. The authors dispel the myths around the development of tea practice, dispute the fiction of the dominance of aesthetics over politics in tea, and demonstrate that writing history has always been an integral part of tea culture.
In Hakata: The Cultural Worlds of Northern Kyushu, experts in various fields have collaborated to produce an interdisciplinary collection offering diverse insights on a region yet to be fully addressed in English. A historic port situated in a strategically vital region as the closest point of contact with the Asian continent, Hakata has long served as a key hub in the transcultural networks linking Japan with the outside world. This volume explores the rich legacy of these wider interactions, in particular the cosmopolitan, international dimension deeply embedded in Hakata's urban culture. With an identity all its own and quite distinct from other regions in Japan, it is a culture once again increasingly relevant in today's world of borderless communications.
In this meticulous and lucid study, Andrew Watsky keenly illustrates how private belief and political ambition influenced artsitic production at the intersection of institutional Buddhism and Shinto during this tumultuous period of rapid and radical political, social, and aesthetic changes. He offers substantial conclusions not only about the specific site, but also, more broadly, about the nature of art production in Japan and how perceptions of the sacred shaped the concerns and actions of the secular rulers ... Watsky has had unique access to the island, and many of the images included here have not previously been published. -- Book Jacket.
An innovative new study of daily life and urban society in late medieval Japan.
This book traces the history of noh and kyōgen, the first major Japanese theatrical arts. Going beyond P. G. O'Neill's Early Nō Drama of 1958, it covers the full period of noh's medieval development and includes a chapter dedicated to the comic art of kyōgen, which has often been left in noh's shadow. It is based on contemporary research in Japan, Asia, Europe and America, and embraces current ideas of theatre history, providing a richly contextualized account which looks closely at theatrical forms and genres as they arose. The masked drama of noh, with its ghosts, chanting and music, and its use in Japanese films, has been the object of modern international interest. However, audiences are often confused as to what noh actually is. This book attempts to answer where noh came from, what it was like in its day, and what it was for. To that end, it contains sections which discuss a number of prominent noh plays in their period and challenges established approaches. It also contains the first detailed study in English of the kyōgen repertoire of the sixteenth-century.
Gender, Continuity, and the Shaping of Modernity in the Arts of East Asia, 16th–20th Centuries explores women’s and men’s contributions to the arts and gendered visual representations in China, Korea, and Japan from the premodern through modern eras. A critical introduction and nine essays consider how threads of continuity and exchanges between the cultures of East Asia, Europe, and the United States helped to shape modernity in this region, in the process revealing East Asia as a vital component of the trans-Pacific world. The essays are organized into three themes: representations of femininity, women as makers, and constructions of gender, and they consider examples of architecture, painting, woodblock prints and illustrated books, photography, and textiles. Contributors are: Lara C. W. Blanchard, Kristen L. Chiem, Charlotte Horlyck, Ikumi Kaminishi, Nayeon Kim, Sunglim Kim, Radu Leca, Elizabeth Lillehoj, Ying-chen Peng, and Christina M. Spiker. Gender, Continuity, and the Shaping of Modernity in the Arts of East Asia, 16th–20th Centuries is now available in paperback for individual customers.
Following the destruction of Kyoto during the civil wars of the late fifteenth century, large-scale panoramic paintings of the city began to emerge. These enormous and intricately detailed depictions of the ancient imperial capital were unprecedented in the history of Japanese painting and remain unmatched as representations of urban life in any artistic tradition. Capitalscapes, the first book-length study of the Kyoto screens, examines their inception in the sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries, focusing on the political motivations that sparked their creation. Close readings of the Kyoto screens reveal that they were initially commissioned by or for members of the Ashikaga shogunate a...
The volume examines the mutually constitutive relationship between the materiality of objects and their aesthetic meanings. Its approach connects material culture with art history, curation, technologies and practices of making. A central dimension of the case studies collected here is the mobility of objects between Europe and China and the transformations that unfold as a result of their transcultural lives. Many of the objects studied here are relatively unknown or understudied. The stories they recount suggest new ways of thinking about space, cultural geographies and the complex and often contradictory association of power and culture. These studies of transcultural objects can suggest ...