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Art in China
China can boast a history of art lasting 5,000 years and embracing a huge diversity of images and objects - jade tablets, painted silk handscrolls and fans, ink and lacquer painting, porcelain-ware, sculptures, and calligraphy. They range in scale from the vast 'terracotta army' with its 7,000or so life-size figures, to the exquisitely delicate writing of fourth-century masters such as Wang Xizhin and his teacher, 'Lady Wei'. But this rich tradition has not, until now, been fully appreciated in the West where scholars have focused their attention on sculpture, downplaying art more highlyprized by the Chinese themselves such as calligraphy. Art in China marks a breakthrough in the study of th...
Chinese Painting and Its Audiences
What is Chinese painting? When did it begin? And what are the different associations of this term in China and the West? In Chinese Painting and Its Audiences, which is based on the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts given at the National Gallery of Art, leading art historian Craig Clunas draws from a wealth of artistic masterpieces and lesser-known pictures, some of them discussed here in English for the first time, to show how Chinese painting has been understood by a range of audiences over five centuries, from the Ming Dynasty to today. Richly illustrated, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences demonstrates that viewers in China and beyond have irrevocably shaped this great artistic trad...
Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China
Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China is not simply a survey of sixteenth-century images, but rather, a thorough and thoughtful examination of visual culture in China's Ming Dynasty, one that considers images wherever they appeared—not only paintings, but also illustrated books, maps, ceramic bowls, lacquered boxes, painted fans, and even clothing and tomb pictures. Clunas's theory of visuality incorporates not only the image and the object upon which it is placed but also the culture which produced and purchased it. Economic changes in sixteenth-century China—the rapid expansion of trade routes and a growing class of consumers—are thus intricately bound up with the evolution of the image itself. Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China will be a touchstone for students of Chinese history, art, and culture.
Fruitful Sites
1.- The Fruitful Garden 2.- The Aesthetic Garden 3.- The Gardens of the Wen Family 4.- The Represented Garden 5.- The Landcape of Number.
Ming
Ask anyone what single object they associate with China and the most common answer will be a Ming vase. Probably without even knowing the dates of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), people are aware of the fragility of its porcelain, its rarity and value. But porcelain is just one part of the story of one of the most glorious epoques of China's past. By focusing on the significant years of the early Ming dynasty and through the themes of court people and their lives, extraordinary developments in culture, the military, religion, diplomacy and trade, this book brings the wider history of this fascinating period to colourful life.
Superfluous Things
Now in paperback This outstanding and original book, presented here with a new preface, examines the history of material culture in early modern China. Craig Clunas analyzes “superfluous things”—the paintings, calligraphy, bronzes, ceramics, carved jade, and other objects owned by the elites of Ming China—and describes contemporary attitudes to them. He informs his discussions with reference to both socio-cultural theory and current debates on eighteenth-century England concerning luxury, conspicuous consumption, and the growth of the consumer society.
Elegant Debts
This book takes an innovative approach to one of the great figures of Chinese culture, the writer and painter Wen Zhengming (1470–1559). Renowned as one of the great “scholar painters” of the Ming dynasty, Wen was enmeshed in a complex web of social obligations, his “elegant debts” as he called them, which led to many of his most celebrated works. Using an unprecedented quantity of primary sources for his life and work, Elegant Debts looks at the ways in which social obligation and gift exchange were central to personal and individual identity in the Ming period. The book also examines Wen’s family relationships, his friends, mentors, and pupils, his sense of a distinct local ide...
Ming China
his illustrated publication is the outcome of the conference 'Ming: Courts and Contacts 1400-1450' held October 9-October 11, 2014 and that accompanied the British Museum's major exhibition Ming: 50 years that changed China (September 2014-January 2015). The scope of the exhibition and conference focused on Ming dynasty China in the years 1400 to 1450.
Fruitful Sites
Gardens are sites that can be at one and the same time admired works of art and valuable pieces of real estate. As the first account in English to be wholly based on contemporary Chinese sources, this beautifully illustrated book grounds the practices of garden-making in Ming Dynasty China (1369–1644) firmly in the social and cultural history of the day. Who owned gardens? Who visited them? How were they represented in words, in paintings and in visual culture generally, and what meanings did these representations hold at different levels of Chinese society? Drawing on a wide range of recent work in cultural theory, Craig Clunas provides for the first time a historical and materialist account of Chinese garden culture, and replaces broad generalizations and orientalist fantasy with a convincing picture of the garden's role in social life.
Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia
The essays in Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia challenge the idea that notions of modernity and colonialism are mere imports from the West, and show how colonial modernity has evolved from and into unique forms throughout Asia. Although the modernity of non-European colonies is as indisputable as the colonial core of European modernity, until recently East Asian scholarship has tried to view Asian colonialism through the paradigm of colonial India (for instance), failing to recognize anti-imperialist nationalist impulses within differing Asian countries and regions. Demonstrating an impatience with social science models of knowledge, the contributors show that binary categories ...
