Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China

Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China PDF Author: Craig Clunas
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 9781861890085
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Get Book Here

Book Description
Pictures were a major source of consumable luxury at this period; pictures not only in the form of independently circulating images classifiable as 'art', but also in the form of wall decoration, in books, prints, maps, 'pictures' on ceramics and lacquer boxes, on textile furnishings, and even on the dress of the prosperous. Artefacts that had previously been decorated with formal patterns, or with plants and animals only, now bore landscape scenes, representations of historical characters and incidents, and scenes from literature, often closely related to the world of the illustrated book.

Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China

Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China PDF Author: Craig Clunas
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 9781861890085
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Get Book Here

Book Description
Pictures were a major source of consumable luxury at this period; pictures not only in the form of independently circulating images classifiable as 'art', but also in the form of wall decoration, in books, prints, maps, 'pictures' on ceramics and lacquer boxes, on textile furnishings, and even on the dress of the prosperous. Artefacts that had previously been decorated with formal patterns, or with plants and animals only, now bore landscape scenes, representations of historical characters and incidents, and scenes from literature, often closely related to the world of the illustrated book.

Pictures & Visuality in Early Modern China

Pictures & Visuality in Early Modern China PDF Author: EBSCO Publishing (Firm)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


Superfluous Things

Superfluous Things PDF Author: Craig Clunas
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824828202
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Screen of Kings

Screen of Kings PDF Author: Craig Clunas
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book Here

Book Description
Screen of Kings is the first book in any language to examine the cultural role of the regional aristocracy – relatives of the emperors – in Ming dynasty China (1368–1644). Through an analysis of their patronage of architecture, calligraphy, painting and other art forms, and through a study of the contents of their splendid and recently excavated tombs, this innovative study puts the aristocracy back at the heart of accounts of China’s culture, from which they have been excluded until very recently. Screen of Kings challenges much of the received wisdom about Ming China. Craig Clunas sheds new light on many familiar artworks, as well as works that have never before been reproduced. New archaeological discoveries have furnished the author with evidence of the lavish and spectacular lifestyles of these provincial princes and demonstrate how central the imperial family was to the high culture of the Ming era. Written by the leading specialist in the art and culture of the Ming period, this book illuminates a key aspect of China’s past, and will significantly alter our understanding of the Ming. It will be enjoyed by anyone with a serious interest in the history and art of this great civilization.

Elegant Debts

Elegant Debts PDF Author: Craig Clunas
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824827724
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Get Book Here

Book Description
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 identity, and the interplay of national and regional politics with the achievements of his long life. It uses the insights of a range of scholarship—art history, social and literary history, and anthropology—to show how “self” was constructed in Ming China. In doing so, it makes a major contribution toward a more diverse art history that is less dependent on European conceptions of artists and their work. Craig Clunas has published extensively in the field, and is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading scholars of Ming culture. Featuring many images of the work of one of China’s major painters, this book is accessible to all who are interested in China’s culture and history, as well as to students and scholars of art history and the history of culture.

Negative Exposures

Negative Exposures PDF Author: Margaret Hillenbrand
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478009047
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Get Book Here

Book Description
When nations decide to disown their troubled pasts, how does this strategic disavowal harden into social fact? In Negative Exposures, Margaret Hillenbrand investigates the erasure of key aspects of such momentous events as the Nanjing Massacre, the Cultural Revolution, and the Tiananmen Square protests from the Chinese historical consciousness, not due to amnesia or censorship but through the operations of public secrecy. Knowing what not to know, she argues, has many stakeholders, willing and otherwise, who keep quiet to protect themselves or their families out of shame, pragmatism, or the palliative effects of silence. Hillenbrand shows how secrecy works as a powerful structuring force in Chinese society, one hiding in plain sight, and identifies aesthetic artifacts that serve as modes of reckoning against this phenomenon. She analyses the proliferation of photo-forms—remediations of well-known photographs of troubling historical events rendered in such media as paint, celluloid, fabric, digital imagery, and tattoos—as imaginative spaces in which the shadows of secrecy are provocatively outlined.

Picturing Heaven in Early China

Picturing Heaven in Early China PDF Author: Lillian Lan-ying Tseng
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684175097
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 479

Get Book Here

Book Description
Tian, or Heaven, had multiple meanings in early China. It had been used since the Western Zhou to indicate both the sky and the highest god, and later came to be regarded as a force driving the movement of the cosmos and as a home to deities and imaginary animals. By the Han dynasty, which saw an outpouring of visual materials depicting Heaven, the concept of Heaven encompassed an immortal realm to which humans could ascend after death. Using excavated materials, Lillian Tseng shows how Han artisans transformed various notions of Heaven—as the mandate, the fantasy, and the sky—into pictorial entities. The Han Heaven was not indicated by what the artisans looked at, but rather was suggested by what they looked into. Artisans attained the visibility of Heaven by appropriating and modifying related knowledge of cosmology, mythology, astronomy. Thus the depiction of Heaven in Han China reflected an interface of image and knowledge. By examining Heaven as depicted in ritual buildings, on household utensils, and in the embellishments of funerary settings, Tseng maintains that visibility can hold up a mirror to visuality; Heaven was culturally constructed and should be culturally reconstructed.

Visualising China, 1845-1965

Visualising China, 1845-1965 PDF Author: Christian Henriot
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004228209
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 541

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Visualizing China, the authors launch a broad inquiry aimed at a synergistic understanding of the story of visuality in modern China. The essays cluster around several nodal points including photographs, advertising, posters and movies, from the 1840s to the 1960s.

Art in China

Art in China PDF Author: Craig Clunas
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780192842077
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book Here

Book Description
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 the subject. Drawing on recent innovative scholarship and on newly-accessible studies in China itself Craig Clunas surveys the full spectrum of the visual arts in China. He ranges from the Neolithic period to the art scene of the 1980s and 1990s,examining art in a variety of contexts as it has been designed for tombs, commissioned by rulers, displayed in temples, created for the men and women of the educated ilite, and bought and sold in the marketplace. Many of the objects illustrated in this book have previously been known only to a fewspecialists, and will be totally new to a general audience.

Chinese Painting and Its Audiences

Chinese Painting and Its Audiences PDF Author: Craig Clunas
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691171939
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
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 tradition. Arguing that audiences within China were crucially important to the evolution of Chinese painting, Clunas considers how Chinese artists have imagined the reception of their own work. By examining paintings that depict people looking at paintings, he introduces readers to ideal types of viewers: the scholar, the gentleman, the merchant, the nation, and the people. In discussing the changing audiences for Chinese art, Clunas emphasizes that the diversity and quantity of images in Chinese culture make it impossible to generalize definitively about what constitutes Chinese painting. Exploring the complex relationships between works of art and those who look at them, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences sheds new light on how the concept of Chinese painting has been formed and reformed over hundreds of years.