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Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China is not simply a survey of sixteenth-century images, but rather, a thorough and thoughtful examination of visual culture in China's Ming Dynasty, one that considers images wherever they appeared—not only paintings, but also illustrated books, maps, ceramic bowls, lacquered boxes, painted fans, and even clothing and tomb pictures. Clunas's theory of visuality incorporates not only the image and the object upon which it is placed but also the culture which produced and purchased it. Economic changes in sixteenth-century China—the rapid expansion of trade routes and a growing class of consumers—are thus intricately bound up with the evolution of the image itself. Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China will be a touchstone for students of Chinese history, art, and culture.
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.
Empire of Great Brightnessis 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 the position occupied by writing and objects featuring writing; to ideas about pleasure, about violence and about ageing. It challenges notions of Ming China as a culture closed off from the rest of the world by emphasizing the vibrant interactions between China and the rest of Asia at this period. Craig Clunas uses a wide range of pictures and objects from Ming China to illustrate familiar areas such as painting and ceramics (including the blue-and-white porcelain of the period, arguably the world’s first global ‘brand’). He draws on items from public and private collections from around the world, which will be new even to specialists, including weapons, architecture, textiles and items of dress, printed books (from Ming pornography to the world’s first illustrated reading book for children). He also examines contemporary sources from government edicts to novels and phrasebooks of colloquial Chinese as well as the most recent scholarship to illuminate this most diverse period of Chinese art and culture. Empire of Great Brightnessoffers a varied and stimulating resource for all scholars of China’s cultural history, for historians and art historians of related aspects of the early modern world, and for readers who are intrigued by China’s past.
"The astounding visual record left by photographers and filmmakers of modern China constitutes a massive archive that awaits incorporation into historical research on China. This volume's studies by multiple contributors offer potential paths for revising practices in historical inquiry and examine how modern Chinese society expressed itself in visual culture"--Provided by publisher
The essays in this volume address a diverse range of issues in China’s narrative art and visual culture mainly from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) to the present. These studies attend to the complex ways in which images circulate in pictorial media and across boundaries between ‘high art’ and popular culture—images in paintings, prints, stone engravings and posters, as well as in film and video art. In addition, the authors examine the roles of ancient exemplary stories and textual narratives, as well as their reiteration in the visual arts in early modern and modern social and political contexts. The volume is divided into three sections: Representing Paradigms, Interpreting Literary Themes and Narratives, and the Medium and Modernity. While the essays in each section deal with concerns in the field of China’s art history, an editors’ introduction serves to position the topic of narrative art and to introduce definitions and genre issues which run through the book. As a whole, the volume invites reflection on the intrinsic nature of narratives and their pictorial lives, and presents new research which challenges established views and paradigms.
The exchange of landscape practice between China and Europe from 1500–1800 is an important chapter in art history. While the material forms of the outcome of this exchange, like jardin anglo-chinoisand Européenerie are well documented, this book moves further to examine the role of the exchange in identity formation in early modern China and Europe. Proposing the new paradigm of “entangled landscapes”, drawing from the concept of “entangled histories”, this book looks at landscape design, cartography, literature, philosophy and material culture of the period. Challenging simplistic, binary treatments of the movements of “influences” between China and Europe, Entangled Landscapes reveals how landscape exchanges entailed complex processes of appropriation, crossover and transformation, through which Chinese and European identities were formed. Exploring these complex processes via three themes—empire building, mediators’ constraints, and aesthetic negotiations, this work breaks new ground in landscape and East-West studies. Interdisciplinary and revisionist in its thrust, it will also benefit scholars of history, human geography and postcolonial studies.
The Image of Modern China is an inter-discplinary look at the phenomenon of contemporary Chinese art. Katie Hill considers themes such as the common aesthetic shared by media as diverse as architecture and advertising. Simultaneously the author sets the modern movement in its historical context, looking back as far as the 1910s. Few books exist which treat the contemporary Chinese art scene; this publication is unique in its approach and in its appeal to both the genereal reader and to the scholar.
Exploring the works of key women writers within their cultural, artistic and socio-political contexts, this book considers changes in the perception of women in early modern China. The sixteenth century brought rapid developments in technology, commerce and the publishing industry that saw women emerging in new roles as both consumers and producers of culture. This book examines the place of women in the cultural elite and in society more generally, reconstructing examples of particular women’s personal experiences, and retracing the changing roles of women from the late Ming to the early Qing era (1580-1700). Providing rich detail of exceptionally fine, interesting and engaging literary works, this book opens fascinating new windows onto the lives, dreams, nightmares, anxieties and desires of the authors and the world out of which they emerged.
Using the concept of theatricality to study Water Margin and Journey to the West, this study illustrates how writing and reading in early modern China became fused with a theatrical imagination in response to destabilizing social and political forces.