China boasts a history of art lasting over 5,000 years and embracing a huge diversity of forms - objects of jade, lacquer and porcelain, painted scrolls and fans, sculptures in stone, bronze and wood, and murals. But this rich tradition has not, until now been fully appreciated in the West where scholars have focused attention on the European high ...
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 7,000 or so life-size figures, to the exquisitely delicate ...
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 innovative, beautifully illustrated book grounds the practices of garden-making in Ming dynasty China (1368-1644) firmly in the social and cultural ...
Chinese export watercolours were produced in the port cities of China for sale to Western customers in the late-18th and 19th centuries. Chapters look at paintings by subject, figure drawings, the crafts of tea growing and porcelain-making, topographical views, and bird and flower painting.
Empire of Great Brightness is an innovative and accessible history of a high point in Chinese culture, seen through the riches of its images and objects. Not a simple emperor-by-emperor history, it instead introduces the reader to themes that provide stimulating and original points of entry to the culture of China: to ideas of motion and rest, to ...
Illustrating the superb collection of Chinese furniture in the Victoria & Albert Museum, this volume is a detailed investigative study which combines material, textural and pictorial evidence to present a balanced view of the furniture and the society that produced it. It is an invaluable work of reference both for art historians and for ...
This work examines the production of luxury goods for export to European, and later to American markets by the highly developed Chinese craft market in the period following the arrival of the first Portuguese in 1514. Individual chapters cover the production of silk, lacquer and furniture.
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. ...
Taking the V & A's Chinese collection as its starting point, this book shows how art objects were used by the Chinese in sumptuous burials, in temples, in the elegant mansions of the rich and the splendid setting of the Imperial Court. It contains sections on the uses of porcelain, laquer, jade, silk and precious metals.
The author 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, the book makes a major contribution towards a more diverse art history that is less dependent on European conceptions of artists and their work.
Gardens are sites that can be at one and the same time admired works of art and valuable pieces of real estate, and this study places the practices of garden-making in China during the Ming dynasty (1369-1644) 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 ...
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 ...
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 innovative, beautifully illustrated book grounds the practices of garden-making in Ming dynasty China (1368-1644) firmly in the social and cultural ...
Based on the magnificent collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, this study focuses on objects that were pricipally carved with a knife. They are divided into three major groupings: materials of animal origin (ivory and rhinoceros horn); materials of vegetable origin (bamboo, wood, gourd); material with mineral origin (soapstone). Richly ...
A complete visual record of 7,000 years of Chinese art and craft objects interprets the cultural history of China. This stunning volume presents extraordinary objects from the Neolithic Age, through the dynasties and up to the present People's Republic era. Rose Kerr is curator of the Far Eastern Collection at London's Victoria and Albert Museum. ...
Aiming to provide a stimulating point of entry to Chinese history, this work presents an introduction to the Chinese "way of seeing". The 16th century was a period of rapid and unprecedented economic expansion in China. It also saw a parallel expansion in the sphere of cultural production, as a growing class of consumers of luxury goods benefited ...
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