Chinese art history

Review:
"Liu Yang’s catalogue for the terracotta warriors…is an outstanding contribution to the literature on the tomb of Qin Shi Huangdi as well as a beautifully illustrated record of the seminal objects from the Terracotta Warriors Museum. Readers will not be disappointed: China’s Terracotta Warriors is much more than yet another book about China’s most glorious excavation site"―Nancy Steinhardt, Orientations

"The extensively illustrated catalogue, one of the most detailed overviews of the Qin and the First Emperor yet published, is vital for anyone even remotely interested in this pivotal period in Chinese art, culture and history."―Martin Barnes Lorber, Asian Art

"The Minneapolis catalogue stands out as one of the most informative and groundbreaking in the mass of books on the terracotta warriors. Within the plethora of books about the First Emperor of China and the terracotta soldiers placed at his tomb, this volume is exceptional in its placing of the First Emperor in his context—a young ruler of a vassal state of questionable 'barbarian' influences forging an empire out of the ruins of an old world, a world he conquered with a invincible army and governed with an iron fist." —Chao-Hui Jenny Liu, China Review International

"This dazzling catalogue by Curator Liu Yang traces the development of the Qin state from the 9th century BCE to the reign of the First Emperor, through an array of sculpted works and architectural remains from Shaanxi province....Written by an internationally renowned cast of scholars, the volume features detailed chapters of manageable length, making it accessible to the undergraduates but also relevant to advanced researchers.....Overall, this is a much-needed update on a well-trodden subjects." —A.R.Miller, Choice

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In the past, researchers who studied ceramics tended to focus on the imitation of marbled ware in the pattern, or to incorporate it into the lead-glazed pottery system to be discussed. Research focused on marbled ware is relatively rare so far, and the value of historical data is still potential to be explored. In addition, in the newly unearthed archaeological information in recent years, marbled ware is widely found in tombs and ruins in East Asia. However, the use of this batch of materials and the export route have not been systematically studied.

In this research, we will first investigate the unearthed materials and related documents, then organize the marbled ware collections of museums in various countries to build a systematic research database. Furthermore, by comparing the styles of each type, this research will try to illustrate the relationship between the production time period and evolution of each type of marbled ware.

After sorting out the basic information of marbled ware in the Tang and Song dynasties, this article will also study the foreign trade status of marbled ware, the class of users and the group of sponsors, and its special significance in religion and political rights. By comprehensively analyzing the historical information revealed by marbled ware, this research will try to restore its context of use during the Tang and Song Dynasties.

The past ten years have been particularly exciting for scholars studying early China. The field has witnessed the publication of a number of scholarly monographs dealing with recent discoveries, and Xiaolong Wu’s recent monograph on the Zhongshan sites during theWarring States Period (475–221 BCE) is a significant and refreshing addition to that growing bibliography and to our knowledge of early Chinese material culture...

本文研究对象是一套北魏石棺床围屏上的孝子叙事图像。围屏现藏于美国密苏里州堪萨斯城纳尔逊-阿特金斯艺术博物馆。长广敏雄、黑田彰以及林圣智等学者曾就围屏组合方式、孝子图像内容等问题进行过详细讨论。尽管如此，围屏中几幅孝子图像的内容仍然存在争议，这影响到对围屏图像整体意义的理解。作者通过实地考察围屏及其图像，首先纠正了之前学者在围屏组合问题上的疏误，进而对存在争议的几幅图像内容重新作出判定。在此基础上，作者比较了孝子故事在围屏上的次序与它们在日本藏阳明文库本六朝《孝子传》中的顺序，发现孝子图像并不完全遵从文献中的顺序，而是按照“事生”“事死”原则重新组合；并推测这种重组很可能体现了墓葬设计中的阴阳观念，即以“事生”图像象征阳气，“事死”图像象征阴气，最终目标是调和阴阳、求得冥福。

"In my study "Prestigegüter entlang der Seidenstraße? Archäologische und historische Untersuchungen zu Chinas Beziehungen zu Kulturen des Tarimbeckens vom zweiten bis frühen fünften Jahrhundert nach Christus (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010)," I developed a method to identify genuine prestige goods in the context of burials. Whenever members of social groups were unable to obtain desired artifacts – be it on account of insufficient financial means or because they were prohibited to acquire them –, they resorted to a rather simple solution: imitations.
As early as the 8th century BCE, people in China began to emulate ritual bronzes. These were the ultimate status symbols at the time and possession of such valuable bronze objects clearly was restricted to the social élite. Various types of bronze vessels and bells constituted a so-called ritual set; the more different objects and the more specimens of each single type of object an individual could call his (sometimes her) own, the higher his / her social rank. At least this much we learn from several prescriptive texts dating from the 2nd through 1st centuries BCE. The ritual bronzes were an integral part of ritual ceremonies held at the ancestral shrines of one’s lineage. They were, however, not only employed to demonstrate one’s social achievements to the ancestors, but ultimately found their way into tombs and hoards where ritual sets are a common sight.
This paper is going to show how sumptuary rules grew less rigid with the factual decline of the Zhou. Earlier, expressing ones social rank through ritual bronzes was the prerogative of dignitaries with close ties to the royal house. Now, even politically rather insignificant local potentates made use of (substandard) replicas in attempts to signal their social position. The prestige of authentic ritual bronzes finally fostered the diffusion of an initially extremely elitist phenomenon. How strongly the association of ritual bronzes with social rank penetrated ancient Chinese thought and practices – that is to say, Chinese culture – is obvious in the fact that imitations of ritual bronzes remained a staple in tomb assemblages at least until the 2nd century CE."

Western understandings of the trajectory of Chinese art following Mao’s death in
1976 have been hampered by several factors. A persistent element is the propensity of Western art historians and critics to impose Western historical patterns, esthetic standards and critical methods to the analysis of Chinese art, its production and expression. This tendency was exacerbated by China’s closing to the West after 1949, which discouraged scholarship and Chinese language study and resulted in a 30-year hiatus in scholarly communications and firsthand knowledge—a situation that invited imagination and speculation that favored an obsessive preference in the West for art that could be interpreted as politically subversive. When China re-opened in the 1980s, scholars of contemporary Chinese art faced the further problem of trying to make sense of an anarchic disarray of theories and practices rushing in to fill the vacuum afforded by the collapse of Marxism-Leninism-Mao-Zedong ideology. The prolific but scattered writings and publications by Chinese artists, critics and theorists were accessible only to those few who already possessed a high level of Chinese language facility including the specially nuanced vocabulary of the art world, as well as a wide-ranging and balanced network of interpersonal contacts. This volume addresses the need for wider access to primary Chinese sources by readers of English.

Paper given at a conference, Bild. Erzählung. Kontext. Visuelle Narration in Kulturen und Gesellschaften der Alten Welt (Image. Narrative. Context. Visual Narration in Cultures and Societies of the Old World), held at Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies.

This book discusses and provides an interpretation of the notion of qiyun in Chinese painting, and considers why creating a painting (especially a landscape painting) replete with qiyun is regarded as an art of genius, where genius is an innate mental talent. A central feature of my discussion is a comparison of the role of this innate mental disposition in the aesthetics of qiyun and Kant’s account of artistic genius. Through this comparison, the book addresses an important feature of the Chinese aesthetic tradition, one that evades the aesthetic universality imposed through the lens of Kant.
The book includes two parts. The first part draws upon the views of Xie He (active 500–ca. 535), the late Tang art historian Zhang Yanyuan (847), the tenth-century landscapist and theorist Jing Hao (ca. 870–ca. 930), the Northern Song art historian Guo Ruoxu (ca. 1080) and the early Yuan connoisseur Tang Hou (ca. 1255–ca. 1317), to explain and discuss qiyun and its development from a notion mainly applied to figure painting to one that also plays an important and enduring role in the aesthetic of landscape painting.
In the light of Kant’s account of genius, the second part examines a range of issues regarding the role of the mind in creating a painting replete with qiyun and the impossibility of teaching qiyun. These include why the ability to create paintings replete with qiyun is regarded as determined by an innate mental disposition endowed by tian (nature) and belonging only to a few gifted artists, how genius establishes pictorial yi (idea) under the animation of shen (spirit) in the context of qiyun-focused landscape painting, how following the rule of tian enables qiyun to be captured in artistic spontaneity, and why somatic training or practice of genius is required despite the impossibility of teaching or learning qiyun. Also discussed are why and how yipin (the untrammelled class) demonstrates the originality and exemplarity of genius, why and how a pure, untrammelled and lofty mind is cultivated as an ideal mental state for conveying qiyun, how the disinterested aesthetic pleasure of the heart in tune with forest and stream is combined with an interest in pursuing the carefree wandering of a city-recluse-artist, and how a balanced human nature is nourished and its union with tian realised through painting a work replete with qiyun. Finally, I explore how the Confucian doctrine of sincerity is involved in spiritual communion (shenhui) between artist, object, work and audience, and how aesthetic autonomy and the moral relevance of art are reconciled under the first criterion of qiyun. The comparison with Kant on these issues demystifies the uniqueness of qiyun aesthetics and also illuminates some limitations in Kant’s aesthetics.

In recent years, a small but growing body of scholarship has emerged on the category of the Chinese art district, particularly its institutionalisation amidst twenty-first century creative industries polices. Such research presents important stories of Chinese artists’ negotiations with urban and political authority, thus nuancing paradigms for the comprehension of political work within contemporary China. This current article contributes to this growing research area by considering the spatial conditions for these socio-spatial categories’ emergence, namely, the urban structures in which they first took shape in 1990s Beijing. First occupying traditional villages (cunzi) and later ex- socialist work units (danwei), these arts colonies appropriated existing communal architecture, and turned their designs and physical buildings to their own communal ends. Importantly, these sites were made available by the dramatic reconstruction of the city, and in this sense these occupations were limited to the temporal realm. To describe the nature of occupations, and their eventual impact upon the shape of the city, this paper proposes the category of “the temporal pocket”: a cellular and temporary inhabitance, defined by the shared investments of its participants, and one that is both discrete (in the sense of its spaces) and discreet (in the sense that this can be understood as a non-oppositional politics). The article is informed by spatial and cultural theory, literature on Chinese urban planning and art history, as well as primary documents (such as documentaries, art works and archival material) and interviews conducted by the researcher in Beijing.

Author: Shane McCausland. Wang Tao and Sajid Rizvi, eds. East Asia Journal ISSN 1464-0414, Volume I Number 1. A few copes of this journal edition are available at the given link to SAFNET. East Asia Journal: Studies in Material Culture takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of material culture in East Asia – China, Japan and Korea — as well as the countries of the Southeast Asian region. Intro blurb: ‘The Admonitions Scroll — Ideals of Etiquette, Art and Empire from Early China,’ Percival David Foundation Colloquies on Art and Archaeology in Asia, Number 21 — an international conference jointly organised by the British Museum and the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, held at the British Museum, 18-20 June 2001. The organisers of this conference took a gamble in thinking they could carry off a major international conference about Chinese painting in London. Had not Europeans’ real interest in Chinese art long been in bronzes, ceramics, jades and other three-dimensional antiquities? Would they now take an
interest in painting, the complicated native ‘foil’ that had made their own field appear well grounded? Was it wise, some observers wondered, to hope to attract high-calibre international scholars in the fi eld of Chinese art history to London for three days of discussion about a single painting? What, indeed, was so important about the Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies (Nüshi zhen tu) attributed to the early master Gu Kaizhi (about 345-406) in the British Museum, the proposed focus of it all? Follow links for further info on this publication, or to order back issues.

Since the nineteenth century, artists, art theorists and art historians have dreamed of a Japanese material aesthetic—of the beauty of the formless, the ephemeral and the processual. This book is the first to explore this history: Japonism as a question of material aesthetics. It uncovers the historical, technical and discursive conditions on which the concept of a Japanese material aesthetic is based, and subjects the iconographic meanings so closely linked to the tradition of Japanese tea ceramics, wooden architecture or ink painting to a critical historical analysis. In doing so, it opens up new perspectives on the modernist art that emerged in Japan after 1945, which is shown to have radically challenged such iconographic fixations.