Picturing the True Form

Picturing the True Form PDF Author: Shih-shan Susan Huang
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 168417516X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 533

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Book Description
"Picturing the True Form investigates the long-neglected visual culture of Daoism, China’s primary indigenous religion, from the tenth through thirteenth centuries with references to both earlier and later times. In this richly illustrated book, Shih-shan Susan Huang provides a comprehensive mapping of Daoist images in various media, including Dunhuang manuscripts, funerary artifacts, and paintings, as well as other charts, illustrations, and talismans preserved in the fifteenth-century Daoist Canon. True form (zhenxing), the key concept behind Daoist visuality, is not static, but entails an active journey of seeing underlying and secret phenomena.This book’s structure mirrors the two-part Daoist journey from inner to outer. Part I focuses on inner images associated with meditation and visualization practices for self-cultivation and longevity. Part II investigates the visual and material dimensions of Daoist ritual. Interwoven through these discussions is the idea that the inner and outer mirror each other and the boundary demarcating the two is fluid. Huang also reveals three central modes of Daoist symbolism—aniconic, immaterial, and ephemeral—and shows how Daoist image-making goes beyond the traditional dichotomy of text and image to incorporate writings in image design. It is these particular features that distinguish Daoist visual culture from its Buddhist counterpart."

Picturing the True Form

Picturing the True Form PDF Author: Shih-shan Susan Huang
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 168417516X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 533

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Picturing the True Form investigates the long-neglected visual culture of Daoism, China’s primary indigenous religion, from the tenth through thirteenth centuries with references to both earlier and later times. In this richly illustrated book, Shih-shan Susan Huang provides a comprehensive mapping of Daoist images in various media, including Dunhuang manuscripts, funerary artifacts, and paintings, as well as other charts, illustrations, and talismans preserved in the fifteenth-century Daoist Canon. True form (zhenxing), the key concept behind Daoist visuality, is not static, but entails an active journey of seeing underlying and secret phenomena.This book’s structure mirrors the two-part Daoist journey from inner to outer. Part I focuses on inner images associated with meditation and visualization practices for self-cultivation and longevity. Part II investigates the visual and material dimensions of Daoist ritual. Interwoven through these discussions is the idea that the inner and outer mirror each other and the boundary demarcating the two is fluid. Huang also reveals three central modes of Daoist symbolism—aniconic, immaterial, and ephemeral—and shows how Daoist image-making goes beyond the traditional dichotomy of text and image to incorporate writings in image design. It is these particular features that distinguish Daoist visual culture from its Buddhist counterpart."

Taoism and the Arts of China

Taoism and the Arts of China PDF Author: Stephen Little
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520227859
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
A celebration of Taoist art traces the influence of philosophy on the visual arts in China.

Visual and Material Cultures in Middle Period China

Visual and Material Cultures in Middle Period China PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004349375
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Eight studies examine key features of Chinese visual and material cultures, ranging from tomb design, metalware, ceramic pillows, and bronze mirrors, to printed illustrations, calligraphic rubbings, colophons, and paintings on Buddhist, landscape, and narrative themes. Questions addressed include how artists and artisans made their works, the ways both popular literature and market forces could shape ways of looking, and how practices and imagery spread across regions. The authors connect visual materials to funeral and religious practices, drama, poetry, literati life, travel, and trade, showing ways visual images and practices reflected, adapted to, and reproduced the culture and society around them. Readers will gain a stronger appreciation of the richness of the visual and material cultures of Middle Period China.

Becoming Guanyin

Becoming Guanyin PDF Author: Yuhang Li
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231548737
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
Winner, 2024 Geiss-Hsu Book Prize for Best First Book, Society for Ming Studies The goddess Guanyin began in India as the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, originally a male deity. He gradually became indigenized as a female deity in China over the span of nearly a millennium. By the Ming (1358–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) periods, Guanyin had become the most popular female deity in China. In Becoming Guanyin, Yuhang Li examines how lay Buddhist women in late imperial China forged a connection with the subject of their devotion, arguing that women used their own bodies to echo that of Guanyin. Li focuses on the power of material things to enable women to access religious experience and transcendence. In particular, she examines how secular Buddhist women expressed mimetic devotion and pursued religious salvation through creative depictions of Guanyin in different media such as painting and embroidery and through bodily portrayals of the deity using jewelry and dance. These material displays expressed a worldview that differed from yet fit within the Confucian patriarchal system. Attending to the fabrication and use of “women’s things” by secular women, Li offers new insight into the relationships between worshipped and worshipper in Buddhist practice. Combining empirical research with theoretical insights from both art history and Buddhist studies, Becoming Guanyin is a field-changing analysis that reveals the interplay between material culture, religion, and their gendered transformations.

Picturing Russia

Picturing Russia PDF Author: Valerie Ann Kivelson
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300119615
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
What can Russian images and objects—a tsar’s crown, a provincial watercolor album, the Soviet Pioneer Palace—tell us about the Russian people and their culture? This wide-ranging book is the first to explore the visual culture of Russia over the entire span of Russian history, from ancient Kiev to contemporary, post-Soviet society. Illustrated with more than one hundred diverse and fascinating images, the book examines the ways that Russians have represented themselves visually, understood their visual environment, and used visual images in social and political contexts. Expert contributors discuss images and objects from all over the Russian/Soviet empire, including consumer goods, architectural monuments, religious icons, portraits, news and art photography, popular prints, films, folk art, and more. Each of the concise and accessible essays in the volume offers a fresh interpretation of Russian cultural history. Putting visuality itself in focus as never before, Picturing Russia adds an entirely new dimension to the study of Russian literature, history, art, and culture. The book enriches our understanding of visual documents and shows the variety of ways they serve as far more than mere illustration.

The Arts of Iran in Istanbul and Anatolia

The Arts of Iran in Istanbul and Anatolia PDF Author: Olga M. Davidson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780674987340
Category : Art, Iranian
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Much medieval Persianate artwork--including books illustrated with exquisite miniature paintings--was disassembled and dispersed as isolated art objects. In The Arts of Iran in Istanbul and Anatolia, a literary historian and six art historians trace the journey from the destructive dispersal of fragments to the joys of restoration.

The Paradox of Being

The Paradox of Being PDF Author: Poul Andersen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684171040
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
The question of truth has never been more urgent than today, when the distortion of facts and the imposition of pseudo-realities in the service of the powerful have become the order of the day. In The Paradox of Being Poul Andersen addresses the concept of truth in Chinese Daoist philosophy and ritual. His approach is unapologetically universalist, and the book may be read as a call for a new way of studying Chinese culture, one that does not shy away from approaching “the other” in terms of an engagement with “our own” philosophical heritage. The basic Chinese word for truth is zhen, which means both true and real, and it bypasses the separation of the two ideas insisted on in much of the Western philosophical tradition. Through wide-ranging research into Daoist ritual, both in history and as it survives in the present day, Andersen shows that the concept of true reality that informs this tradition posits being as a paradox anchored in the inexistent Way (Dao). The preferred way of life suggested by this insight consists in seeking to be an exception to ordinary norms and rules of behavior which nonetheless engages what is common to us all.

The Diagram As Paradigm

The Diagram As Paradigm PDF Author: Jeffrey F. Hamburger
Publisher: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library & Collection
ISBN: 9780884024866
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
The Diagram as Paradigm explores medieval diagrams in Byzantium, the Islamicate world, and the Latin West. Case studies consider the theoretical dimensions of diagramming in historical disciplines ranging from philosophy to cosmology. Four introductory essays provide overviews of diagrammatic traditions of the regions explored in this volume.

Picturing Kingship

Picturing Kingship PDF Author: Harvey Stahl
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 474

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Book Description
Picturing Kingship presents the first comprehensive art-historical study of the personal prayerbook of King Louis IX. The book approaches the St. Louis Psalter through a rich range of perspectives and methodologies and positions it within the contexts of its production and use. Not only is the manuscript's production and structure given detailed study, but the king's ways of handling his prayerbook--his habits of reading, looking, and praying--are also set forth in a compelling narrative of his view of his sacred responsibilities as king. In the first half of the book, Stahl investigates the Psalter's physical construction and development within the context of manuscript production in thirteenth-century Paris. The second half looks at the Psalter's thematic and iconographic workings and the role of the king's adviser--Vincent of Beauvais--in the Psalter's shaping. Most important, though, the author delves into the meanings the Psalter might have held for the king, who was a crusader and so devout a Christian that he was canonized by Boniface VIII. Stahl makes it clear that the Psalter, already recognized as one of the true masterworks of thirteenth-century French culture, should also be recognized as a significant force in Louis IX's life and reign.

Picturing American Modernity

Picturing American Modernity PDF Author: Kristen Whissel
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822391457
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
In Picturing American Modernity, Kristen Whissel investigates the relationship between early American cinema and the experience of technological modernity. She demonstrates how between the late 1890s and the eve of the First World War moving pictures helped the U.S. public understand the possibilities and perils of new forms of “traffic” produced by industrialization and urbanization. As more efficient ways to move people, goods, and information transformed work and leisure at home and contributed to the expansion of the U.S. empire abroad, silent films presented compelling visual representations of the spaces, bodies, machines, and forms of mobility that increasingly defined modern life in the United States and its new territories. Whissel shows that by portraying key events, achievements, and anxieties, the cinema invited American audiences to participate in the rapidly changing world around them. Moving pictures provided astonishing visual dispatches from military camps prior to the outbreak of fighting in the Spanish-American War. They allowed audiences to delight in images of the Pan-American Exposition, and also to mourn the assassination of President McKinley there. One early film genre, the reenactment, presented spectators with renditions of bloody battles fought overseas during the Philippine-American War. Early features offered sensational dramatizations of the scandalous “white slave trade,” which was often linked to immigration and new forms of urban work and leisure. By bringing these frequently distant events and anxieties “near” to audiences in cities and towns across the country, the cinema helped construct an American national identity for the machine age.