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Although the history of technological and scientific illustrations is a well-established field in the West, scholarship on the much longer Chinese experience is still undeveloped. This work by Peter Golas is a short, illustrated overview tracing the subject to pre-Han inscriptions but focusing mainly on the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. His main theme is that technological drawings developed in a different way in China from in the West largely because they were made by artists rather than by specialist illustrators or practitioners of technology. He examines the techniques of these artists, their use of painting, woodblock prints and the book, and what their drawings reveal about changing technology in agriculture, industry, architecture, astronomical, military, and other spheres. The text is elegantly written, and the images, about 100 in all, are carefully chosen. This is likely to appeal to both scholars and general readers.
Picturing China in the American Press juxtaposes what the ordinary American news reader was shown visually inTime Magazine between 1949 and 1973 with contemporary perspectives on the behind-the-scenes history of the period. Time Magazine is an especially fruitful source for such a visual-historical contrast and comparison because it was China-centric, founded and run by Henry Luce, a man who loved China and was commensurably obsessed with winning China to democracy and Western influence. Picturing China examines in detail major events (the Korean War and Nixon's trip to China), less considerable occurrences (shellings of Straits islands and diplomatic flaps), great personages (Chairman Mao and Henry Kissinger), and the common people and common life of China as seen through the lenses and described by the pens of American reporters, artists, photographers, and editors. Picturing China in the American Press is of great interest to both scholars of communications, Chinese history, China Studies, and journalists.
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.
Provides an innovative reinterpretation of the cultural revolution through the medium of the poster -- a major component of popular print culture in China.
"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."
This volume provides a history of how “the human” has been constituted as a subject of scientific inquiry in China from the seventeenth century to the present.
Identifying four spheres of knowledge culture in the history of technology in China, this book offers an introduction to the transmission of knowledge and detailed contextual descriptions of individual technologies in China such as porcelain, silk, and agriculture.
The traditional concept of scientific knowledge places a premium on thinking, not visualizing. Scientific illustrations are still generally regarded as devices that serve as heuristic aids when reasoning breaks down. When scientific illustration is not used in this disparaging sense as a linguistic aid, it is most often employed as a metaphor with no special visual content. What distinguishes pictorial devices as resources for doing science, and the special problems that are raised by the mere presence of visual elements in scientific treatises, tends to be overlooked. The contributors to this volume examine the historical and philosophical issues concerning the role that scientific illustration plays in the creation of scientific knowledge. They regard both text and picture as resources that scientists employ in their practical activities, their value as scientific resources deriving from their ability to convey information.