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Mu Xin (b. 1927) is one of the leading artist-intellectuals of the Chinesediaspora. Now living in New York City, he is known for his complex writings and paintings. A formidable figure in the cultural and intellectual history of Chinese modernism, Mu Xin is admired for his unique synthesis of Chinese and Western aesthetic sensibilities and intellectual traditions. This beautifully illustrated catalogue focuses on a group of thirty-three landscape paintings that Mu Xin painted between 1977 and 1979, in the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. Many of these works have never been exhibited or published in the West. In addition, the book features Mu Xin's Prison Notes, sixty-six sheets that were written when the artist was in solitary confinement in China in 1971-72. This catalogue will accompany an exhibition on view at the Yale University Art Gallery from October 2 to December 9, 2001. The exhibition will then travel to the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago from January 24 through March 31, 2002, at the Honolulu Academy of Art from October 2 to December 1, 2002 and at the Asia Society in New York City. Other venues to be anounced.
A dazzling cycle of short stories by one of China’s most revered contemporary writers and one of the world’s leading artist-intellectuals. An Empty Room is the first book by the celebrated Chinese writer Mu Xin to appear in English. A cycle of thirteen tenderly evocative stories written while Mu Xin was living in exile, this collection is reminiscent of the structural beauty of Hemingway’s In Our Time and the imagistic power of Kawabata’s palm-of-the-hand stories. From the ordinary (a bus accident) to the unusual (Buddhist halos) to the wise (Goethe, Lao Zi), Mu Xin’s wandering “I” interweaves plots with philosophical grace and spiritual profundity. A small blue bowl becomes a symbol of vanishing childhood; a painter in a race against fading memory scribbles notes in an underground prison during the Cultural Revolution; an abandoned temple room holds a dark mystery. An Empty Room is a soul-stirring page turner, a Sebaldian reverie of passing time, loss, and humanity regained.
A writer experiences life in exile.
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2016. Sad, Bad, Mad, and Sweet considers nostalgia as a force that shapes culture, the self, and the state. It describes ways in which the nostalgic impulse is co-opted, created, questioned, and championed from a diverse array of disciplinary perspectives. Nostalgia as feeling is pivotal in the construction and contradiction of identity; as tool it is vital in the morphing and moulding of history. From post-colonial, to post-Soviet, to post-national views of home and the past, to the sculpting of story itself, this volume asks questions about how we remember and what those memories might offer. The chapters seek to warn and reassure, to imagine and to restrain; they all acknowledge the power of this bitter and sweet longing for something lost – whether real or imagined – and explore the ways in which nostalgia shapes the stories we tell about ourselves. The volume is an important contribution to the ways in which this multifaceted, much-maligned sentiment is considered.
An unprecedented survey of artists in exile from the 19th century through the present day, with notable attention to Asian, Latin American, African American, and female artists This timely book offers a wide-ranging and beautifully illustrated study of exiled artists from the 19th century through the present day, with notable attention to individuals who have often been relegated to the margins of publications on exile in art history. The artworks featured here, including photography, paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture, present an expanded view of the conditions of exile--forced or voluntary--as an agent for both trauma and ingenuity. The introduction outlines the history and percept...
Resisting Spirits is a reconsideration of the significance and periodization of literary production in the high socialist era, roughly 1953 through 1966, specifically focused on Mao-era culture workers’ experiments with ghosts and ghost plays. Maggie Greene combines rare manuscript materials—such as theatre troupes’ annotated practice scripts—with archival documents, memoirs, newspapers, and films to track key debates over the direction of socialist aesthetics. Through arguments over the role of ghosts in literature, Greene illuminates the ways in which culture workers were able to make space for aesthetic innovation and contestation both despite and because of the constantly shiftin...
A chronological and interdisciplinary study of early China from the Neolithic through Warring States periods (ca 5000-500BCE).
This work offers the most comprehensive account of the origin and consequences of the Yan'an Rectification Movement from 1942 to 1945. The author argues that this campaign emancipated the Chinese Communist Party from Sovietinfluenced dogmatism and unified the Party, preparing it for the final victory against the Nationalist Party in 1949. More importantly, this monograph shows in great detail how Mao Zedong established his leadership through this partywide political movement by means of aggressive intraparty purges, thought control, coercive cadre examinations, and total reorganizations of the Party's upper structure. The result of this movement not only set up the foundation for Mao's new China, but also deeply influenced the Chinese political structure today. The Chinese version of How the Red Sun Rose was published in 2000, and has had nineteen printings since then.
Shanghai's "Literary Comet" When the avant-garde writer Mu Shiying was assassinated in 1940, China lost one of its greatest modernist writers while Shanghai lost its most detailed chronicler of the city's Jazz-Age nightlife. Mu's highly original stream-of-consciousness approach to short story writing deserves to be re-examined and re-read. As Andrew Field argues, Mu advanced modern Chinese writing beyond the vernacular expression of May Fourth giants Lu Xun and Lao She to reveal even more starkly the alienation of a city trapped between the forces of civilization and barbarism in the 1930s. Mu Shiying: China's Lost Modernist includes translations of six short stories, four of which have not ...