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The painting Qingming Shang He Tu ("Scenes along the River during the Qingming Festival"),an over 16-foot panorama running from right to left, is considered to be one of the most brilliant works in Chinese art history. It is a masterpiece of realism, recording the pulse of a thriving, historical town and showing extraordinary detail.
This book invites senior experts and scholars from the fields of Chinese archaeology and history to describe ten influential “national treasure-level” cultural antiquities. Spanning from the Neolithic Age to modernity and with content ranging from the origin of civilizations to the red cultural relics, the book covers cultural antiquities, including: the Clay Figurine, the Painted Pottery Plate with Coiling Long Pattern (from the Neolithic Period), the Turquoise-inlaid and Long-shaped Bronze Object (of the Xia Dynasty), the Ivory Goblet Inlaid with Turquoise (of the Shang Dynasty), the He Zun (Ritual Wine Vessel), the Ox-shaped Zun (Wine Vessel), the Arm Protector with Animal and Clouds (and embroidered with the Chinese characters meaning “five stars appear in the East, which is a sign of Chinese victory over the Qiang”), the Beast-head-shaped Agate Cup (of the Tang Dynasty), the Imperial Gilt Gold Mesh Crown with Two Upright Wings (of the Ming Dynasty), etc. The text features not only scientific rigor but is also enjoyable to read and thought-provoking.
Beginning with a concise and well-illustrated history of the evolution of the tradition, this new study reveals how these images were deployed in the Manchu (Qing) imperial court to define political, social, or cultural boundaries. Characterized by grand conception and regal splendor, the paintings served to enhance the imperial authority of rulers and, to a segment of the elite, to advertise social status.
The essays presented in this volume, first published in 2000, describe a phenomenon so widespread in human time and space that its importance is easily overlooked. City walls shaped the history of warfare; the mobilisation of manpower and resources needed to build them favoured some kinds of polities over others; and their massive strength, appropriately ornamented, created a visual language of authority. Previous collective volumes on the subject have dealt mainly with Europe, but the historians and art historians who collaborate here follow a comparative agenda. The millennial practice of wall building that branched out from the ancient Near East into India, Europe, and North Africa shows continuities and points of contact of which the makers of urban fortifications were scarcely aware; separate traditions in China, sub-Saharan Africa, and North America illustrate universal themes of defensive strategy and the symbolism of power, each time embedded in a distinctive local context.
Written by a team of eminent international scholars, this book is the first to recount the history of Chinese painting over a span of some 3000 years.
Challenges the accepted wisdom about women and gender roles in medieval China. In Crossing the Gate, Man Xu examines the lives of women in the Chinese province of Fujian during the Song dynasty. Tracking womens life experience across class lines, outside as well as inside the domestic realm, Xu challenges the accepted wisdom about women and gender roles in medieval China. She contextualizes women in a much broader physical space and social network, investigating the gaps between ideals and reality and examining womens own agency in gender construction. She argues that womens autonomy and mobility, conventionally attributed to Ming-Qing women of late imperial China, can be traced to the Song era. This thorough study of Song womens life experience connects women to the great political, economic, and social transitions of the time, and sheds light on the so-called Song-Yuan-Ming transition from the perspective of gender studies. By putting women at the center of analysis and by focusing on the local and the quotidian, Crossing the Gate offers a new and nuanced picture of the Song Confucian revival.
A history of the reception of Chinese painting from the sixteenth century to the present 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. Chinese Painting and Its Audiences demonstrates that viewers...
Perhaps because of the long history and richness of China’s civilization as well as the diversity and complexity of its culture, many find the country a tough place to get a handle on. As is so often the case, the understanding of China is reduced to oversimplification, aphorism and, sometimes, just one magical word such as face, guanxi (關係) or wuxia (武俠). The truth, however, is there’s no open sesame for entering the Chinese mind. Understanding China is, at root, understanding its people and culture, history and geography. There are as many knowledgeable books as one can count on Chinese history and culture, written by academics who’ve spent their lifetimes studying particular...
In Painting Architecture: Jiehua in Yuan China, 1271–1368, Leqi Yu has conducted comprehensive research on jiehua or ruled-line painting, a unique painting genre in fourteenth-century China. This genre relies on tools such as rulers to represent architectural details and structures accurately. Such technical consideration and mechanical perfection linked this painting category with the builder’s art, which led to Chinese elites’ belittlement and won Mongol patrons’ admiration. Yu suggests that painters in the Yuan dynasty made new efforts towards a unique modular system and an unsurpassable plain-drawing tradition. She argues that these two strategies made architectural paintings in ...