This richly illustrated book provides an anthology and summation of the work of one of the world's leading historians of Chinese painting and calligraphy. Wen Fong helped create the field of East Asian art history during a distinguished five-decade career at Princeton University and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Few if any other writers in English have such a broad knowledge of the history and practice of calligraphy and Chinese painting. In this collection of some of his most recent essays, Fong gives a sweeping tour through the history of Chinese painting and calligraphy as he offers new and revised views on a broad range of important subjects.

The topics addressed include "art as history," in which each art object preserves a moment in art's own significant history; the museum as a place of serious study and education; the close historical relationship between calligraphy and painting and their primacy among Chinese fine arts; the parallel development of representational painting and sculpture in early painting history; the greater significance of brushwork, seen abstractly as a means of personal expression by the artist, in later painting history; the paradigmatic importance of the master-to-follower lineage--of genealogy as a social force--in shaping the continuity and directing the subtle changes in Chinese painting history; the role of collectors; and the critical necessity of authenticated works for establishing an accurate art history.

Throughout the book, Fong skillfully combines close analysis and detailed contextualization of individual works to reveal how the study of Chinese painting and calligraphy yields deep insights about Chinese culture and history.

In Unfixed Jennifer Bajorek traces the relationship between photography and decolonial political imagination in Francophone west Africa in the years immediately leading up to and following independence from French colonial rule in 1960. Focusing on images created by photographers based in Senegal and Benin, Bajorek draws on formal analyses of images and ethnographic fieldwork with photographers to show how photography not only reflected but also actively contributed to social and political change. The proliferation of photographic imagery-through studio portraiture, bureaucratic ID cards, political reportage and photojournalism, magazines, and more-provided the means for west Africans to express their experiences, shape public and political discourse, and reimagine their world. In delineating how west Africans' embrace of photography was associated with and helped spur the democratization of political participation and the development of labor and liberation movements, Bajorek tells a new history of photography in west Africa-one that theorizes photography's capacity for doing decolonial work.

Cemeteries are the repositories of history and personal narrative, places of comfort and beauty. Beginning in 1994, photographer and installation artist Kathy T. Hettinga began a fourteen-year project to document an unknown body of funerary folk art displayed in the cemeteries of the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado. The book begins with the author's story of death and loss as a young widow living in the San Luis Valley. Years later, the beauty of the valley was relentless in calling her back to document the places and the ways people honor those that have died. Grave Images recounts Hettinga's spiritual and artistic journey to find meaning in the cemeteries of rural and largely Hispanic communities of the San Luis Valley. Her photographs of unique grave markers made of wood, concrete, metal, sandstone, glass and other materials by individuals or families to commemorate the passing of loved ones capture the ethereal beauty of the cemeteries and serve as a touchstone for our common understanding of loss, grief, and the need to memorialize and pay tribute. Hettinga's illuminating narrative articulates the meaning of this visual record from the perspective of an artist and provides religious and historical perspectives on the San Luis Valley as final resting place. This book will appeal to artists, art historians, ethnographers, historians, scholars of religion and general audiences interested in photography, folk art, and the history of the San Luis Valley.

As its teachings spread from the Indian subcontinent in all directions across Asia, Buddhism influenced every culture it touched--from Afghanistan to Korea, from Mongolia to Java. Buddhist art is a radiant reflection of the encounter of the Buddha's teachings with the diverse civilizations that came under their sway. It is also an intriguing visual record of the evolution of Buddhist practice and philosophy over a period of more than two millennia.
More than two hundred photographs provide the visual context for this tour of the world of Buddhist art. Included in the rich variety of forms are architecture and monumental art, statuary, paintings, calligraphy, fresco, brushwork, and textile arts. Denise Leidy's guide is the perfect introductory text for all those intrigued by this splendid aesthetic tradition. It also an essential resource for all who seek to understand Buddhist art as teaching.

Taking an approach that is equal parts anthropological and art historical, this lavishly illustrated volume offers a rare look at the art, artifacts, and culture of the Naga people, an ethnic group spanning several tribes native to northeastern India and northwestern Myanmar. The book seeks to shed light on this geographically isolated and historically insular people, identifying cultural aspects and artistic traditions that are common among all Naga tribes, as well as ways in which the tribes differ. The works featured include textiles, baskets, wood carving, pottery, metalwork, jewelry, and beadwork, and make use of a wide range of materials such as glass, stone, metal, wood, shell, seeds, bone, and hair. Archival photography is used to place clothing, accessories, and ornaments within the cultural practices of the Naga. Distributed for Mercatorfonds

Research outside Japan on the history and significance of the Japanese visual arts since the beginning of the Meiji period (1868) has been, with the exception of writings on modern and contemporary woodblock prints, a relatively unexplored area of inquiry. In recent years, however, the subject has begun to attract wide interest. As is evident from this volume, this period of roughly a century and a half produced an outpouring of art created in a bewildering number of genres and spanning a wide range of aims and accomplishments. Since Meiji is the first sustained effort in English to discuss in any depth a time when Japan, eager to join in the larger cultural developments in Europe and the U.S., went through a visual revolution. Indeed, this study of the visual arts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries suggests a fresh history of modern Japanese culture--one that until now has not been widely visible or thoroughly analyzed outside that country. In this extensive collection, which includes some 190 black-and-white and color reproductions, scholars from Japan, Europe, Australia, and America explore an impressive array of subjects: painting, sculpture, prints, fashion design, crafts, and gardens. The works discussed range from early Meiji attempts to create art that referenced Western styles to postwar and contemporary avant-garde experiments. There are, in addition, substantive investigations of the cultural and intellectual background that helped stimulate the creation of new and shifting art forms, including essays on the invention of a modern artistic vocabulary in the Japanese language and the history of art criticism in Japan, as well as an extensive account of the career and significance of perhaps the best-known Japanese figure concerned with the visual arts of his period, Okakura Tenshin (1862-1913), whose Book of Tea is still widely read today. Taken together, the essays in this volume allow readers to connect ideas and images, thus bringing to light larger trends in the Japanese visual arts that have made possible the vitality, range, and striking achievements created during this turbulent and lively period. Contributors: Stephen Addiss, Chiaki Ajioka, John Clark, Ellen Conant, Mikiko Hirayama, Michael Marra, Jonathan Reynolds, J. Thomas Rimer, Audrey Yoshiko Seo, Eric C. Shiner, Lawrence Smith, Shuji Tanaka, Reiko Tomii, Mayu Tsuruya, Toshio Watanabe, Gennifer Weisenfeld, Bert Winther-Tamaki, Emiko Yamanashi.

After the death of Joseph Stalin, Soviet-era Russia experienced a flourishing artistic movement due to relaxed censorship and new economic growth. In this new atmosphere of freedom, Russia's satirical magazine Krokodil (The Crocodile) became rejuvenated. John Etty explores Soviet graphic satire through Krokodil and its political cartoons. He investigates the forms, production, consumption, and functions of Krokodil, focusing on the period from 1954 to 1964. Krokodil remained the longest-serving and most important satirical journal in the Soviet Union, unique in producing state-sanctioned graphic satirical comment on Soviet and international affairs for over seventy years. Etty's analysis of Krokodil extends and enhances our understanding of Soviet graphic satire beyond state-sponsored propaganda. For most of its life, Krokodil consisted of a sixteen-page satirical magazine comprising a range of cartoons, photographs, and verbal texts. Authored by professional and nonprofessional contributors and published by Pravda in Moscow, it produced state-sanctioned satirical comment on Soviet and international affairs from 1922 onward. Soviet citizens and scholars of the USSR recognized Krokodil as the most significant, influential source of Soviet graphic satire. Indeed, the magazine enjoyed an international reputation, and many Americans and Western Europeans, regardless of political affiliation, found the images pointed and witty. Astoundingly, the magazine outlived the USSR but until now has received little scholarly attention.

Taking as its departure point Bernard Smith's classic study, European Vision and the South Pacific (1960), Double Vision explores the ambivalences of European perceptions of the Pacific and juxtaposes them with the indigenous visual cultures that challenge Western assumptions about art and representation. Double Vision addresses these larger interpretive questions through case studies of the cultures of voyages, colonial art, and indigenous affirmations of identity. It suggests that images and texts can be combined through a new practice of innovative, visually oriented cultural history. This approach yields a fresh understanding of history, colonialism and culture in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific. Double Vision is a challenging combination of visual and textual inquiry, and its outstanding list of contributors offers a fresh perspective on art and history in the Pacific.

Winner of the Shimada Prize for Outstanding Work of East Asian Art History By the end of the sixth century CE, both the royal courts and the educated elite in China were collecting works of art, particularly scrolls of calligraphy and paintings done by known artists. By the time of Emperor Huizong (1082-1135) of the Song dynasty (960-1279), both scholars and the imperial court were cataloguing their collections and also collecting ancient bronzes and rubbings of ancient inscriptions. The catalogues of Huizong's painting, calligraphy, and antiquities collections list over 9,000 items, and the tiny fraction of the listed items that survive today are all among the masterpieces of early Chinese art. Patricia Ebrey's study of Huizong's collections places them in both political and art historical context. The acts of adding to and cataloguing the imperial collections were political ones, among the strategies that the Song court used to demonstrate its patronage of the culture of the brush, and they need to be seen in the context of contemporary political divisions and controversies. At the same time, court intervention in the art market was both influenced by, and had an impact on, the production, circulation, and imagination of art outside the court. Accumulating Culture provides a rich context for interpreting the three book-length catalogues of Huizong's collection and specific objects that have survived. It contributes to a rethinking of the cultural side of Chinese imperial rule and of the court as a patron of scholars and the arts, neither glorifying Huizong as a man of the arts nor castigating him as a megalomaniac, but rather taking a hardheaded look at the political and cultural ramifications of collecting and the reasons for choices made by Huizong and his curators. The reader is offered glimpses of the magnificence of the collections he formed and the disparate fates of the objects after they were seized as booty by the Jurchen invaders in 1127. The heart of the book examines in detail the primary fields of collecting -- antiquities, calligraphy, and painting. Chapters devoted to each of these use Huizong's catalogues to reconstruct what was in his collection and to probe choices made by the cataloguers. The acts of inclusion, exclusion, and sequencing that they performed allowed them to influence how people thought of the collection, and to attempt to promote or demote particular artists and styles. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Chinese art history, social history, and culture, as well as art collectors. Published with the assistance of The Getty Foundation.

Three essays by leading scholars in the field of Japanese art explore Sesson's unique existence and unconventional painting style, as well as how scholarly perceptions of the artist have changed over time. Fifty-three entries highlight major works by Sesson as well as those by other artists before, during, and after his time. Sesson Shukei stands out as an anomaly in the history of Japanese art. Among the vast canon of Japanese ink painting, Sesson departed from convention. Inspired by the untamed landscape of the eastern regions of Japan, Sesson led a peripatetic existence caused by a lifetime of experiencing warfare and upheaval-yet he created some of the most visually striking images in the history of Japanese ink painting. This publication explores new ways of understanding and interpreting one of Japan's greatest painters and the world that shaped him.

At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. The Hasegawa Reader is an open access companion to the bilingual catalogue copublished with The Noguchi Museum to accompany an international touring exhibition, Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan. The exhibition features the work of two artists who were friends and contemporaries: Isamu Noguchi and Saburo Hasegawa. This volume is intended to give scholars and general readers access to a wealth of archival material and writings by and about Saburo Hasegawa. While Noguchi's reputation as a preeminent American sculptor of the twentieth century only grows stronger, Saburo Hasegawa is less well known, despite being considered the most literate artist in Japan during his lifetime (1906-1957). Hasegawa is credited with introducing abstraction in Japan in the mid 1930s, and he worked as an artist in diverse media including oil and ink painting, photography, and printmaking. He was also a theorist and widely published essayist, curator, teacher, and multilingual conversationalist. This valuable trove of Hasegawa material includes the entire manuscript for a 1957 Hasegawa memorial volume, with its beautiful essays by philosopher Alan Watts, Oakland Museum Director Paul Mills, and Japan Times art writer Elise Grilli, as well as various unpublished writings by Hasegawa. The ebook edition will also include a dozen essays by Hasegawa from the postwar period, and one prewar essay, professionally translated for this publication to give a sense of Hasegawa's voice. This resource will be an invaluable tool for scholars and students interested in midcentury East Asian and American art and tracing the emergence of contemporary issues of hybridity, transnationalism, and notions of a "global Asia."

This study offers a new approach to the history of sites, archaeology, and heritage formation in Asia, at both the local and the trans-regional levels. Starting at Hindu-Buddhist, Chinese, Islamic, colonial, and prehistoric heritage sites in Indonesia, the focus is on people's encounters and the knowledge exchange taking place across colonial and post-colonial regimes. Objects are followed as they move from their site of origin to other locations, such as the Buddhist statues from Borobudur temple, that were gifted to King Chulalongkorn of Siam. The ways in which the meaning of these objects transformed as they moved away to other sites reveal their role in parallel processes of heritage formation outside Indonesia. Calling attention to the power of the material remains of the past, Marieke Bloembergen and Martijn Eickhoff explore questions of knowledge production, the relationship between heritage and violence, and the role of sites and objects in the creation of national histories.

Assembly of the Exalted presents some 50 pieces from the remarkable collection of Alice S. Kandell. The works, dating from the late 13th century to the early 20th, include great masterpieces and emblematic examples of Tibetan Buddhist art. They are all presented here as the constituents of a Tibetan Buddhist shrine. Shrines, both modest and grand, are the primary sites of Tibetan Buddhist practice, whether it be reciting scriptures, performing rituals, saying prayers, or engaging in meditation. The introductory essays thus focus on the Tibetan Buddhist shrine, describing its evolution over the history of Buddhism, its special role in Tibet, and how the pieces in the Kandell Collection came to be assembled and displayed in shrines at institutions across America. Illustrated with vivid photography, forty short essays, each centered on a single work or set of objects, describe the pieces in terms of their importance for the practice of Buddhism, highlighting the many essential functions of Tibetan Buddhist art within the space of a shrine.

A fascinating look at artistic experiments with televisual forms. Following the integration of television into the fabric of American life in the 1950s, experimental artists of the 1960s began to appropriate this novel medium toward new aesthetic and political ends. As Erica Levin details in The Channeled Image, groundbreaking artists like Carolee Schneemann, Bruce Conner, Stan VanDerBeek, and Aldo Tambellini developed a new formal language that foregrounded television's mediation of a social order defined by the interests of the state, capital, and cultural elites. The resulting works introduced immersive projection environments, live screening events, videographic distortion, and televised happenings, among other forms. For Levin, "the channeled image" names a constellation of practices that mimic, simulate, or disrupt the appearance of televised images. This formal experimentation influenced new modes of installation, which took shape as multi-channel displays and mobile or split-screen projections, or in some cases, experimental work produced for broadcast. Above all, this book asks how artistic experimentation with televisual forms was shaped by events that challenged television broadcasters' claims to authority, events that set the stage for struggles over how access to the airwaves would be negotiated in the future.

Art, Observation, and an Anthropology of Illustration examines the role of sketches, drawings and other artworks in our understanding of human cultures of the past. Bringing together art historians and anthropologists, it presents a selection of detailed case studies of various bodies of work produced by non-Western and Western artists from different world regions and from different time periods (from Native North America, Cameroon, and Nepal, to Italy, Solomon Islands, and Mexico) to explore the contemporary relevance and challenges implicit in artistic renditions of past peoples and places. In an age when identities are partially constructed on the basis of existing visual records, the book asks important questions about the nature of observation and the inclusion of culturally-relevant information in artistic representations. How reliable are watercolours, paintings, or sketches for the understanding of past ways of life? How do old images of bygone peoples relate to art historical and anthropological canons? How have these images and technologies of representation been used to describe, illustrate, or explain unknown realities? The book is an essential tool for art historians, anthropologists, and anyone who wants to understand how the observation of different realities has impacted upon the production of art and visual cultures. Incorporating current methodological and theoretical tools, the 10 chapters collected here expand the area of connection between the disciplines of art history and anthropology, bringing into sharp focus the multiple intersections of objectivity, evidence, and artistic licence.

An illustrated compendium of artworks from the ancient Americas Including Indigenous works from the southwestern United States, Mesoamerica, the Isthmo-Colombian Area, and the Andes of South America, this book showcases more than 100 masterpieces of art from the ancient Americas. These are presented in historical, archaeological, and artistic context with new photography and scholarship. The publication considers ceramics, metalworks, stone carvings, and textiles from an array of America's earliest civilizations, including Ancestral Puebloan, Mexica, Olmec, Maya, Chavin, Inca, Moche, Wari, and more. Highlights include some exceptional rarities, including a Chavin crown with deity figures, a previously undefined style of four-panel Andean tunics, a Mixtec mosaic mask, a Maya lidded tetrapod bowl, and breathtaking gold jewelry from the Isthmo-Colombian Area. Distributed for the Dallas Museum of Art

Situated in the fields of contemporary literary and cultural studies, the ten essays collected in Generations of Dissent shed light on the artistic creativity, cultural production, intellectual movements, and acts of political dissidence across the Middle East and North Africa. Born of the contributors' research on dissidence and state co-option in a variety of artistic and creative fields, the volume's core themes reflect the notion that the recent Arab uprisings did not appear in a cultural, political, or historical vacuum. Rather than focus on how protestors "finally" broke the walls of fear created by authoritarian regimes in the region, these essays show that the uprisings were rooted in multiple generations and various acts of resistance decades prior to 2010-11. Firat and Taleghani's volume maps the complicated trajectories of artistic and creative dissent across time and space, showing how artists have challenged institutions and governments over the past six decades.

Mapping Modernisms brings together scholars working around the world to address the modern arts produced by indigenous and colonized artists. Expanding the contours of modernity and its visual products, the contributors illustrate how these artists engaged with ideas of Primitivism through visual forms and philosophical ideas. Although often overlooked in the literature on global modernisms, artists, artworks, and art patrons moved within and across national and imperial borders, carrying, appropriating, or translating objects, images, and ideas. These itineraries made up the dense networks of modern life, contributing to the crafting of modern subjectivities and of local, transnationally inflected modernisms. Addressing the silence on indigeneity in established narratives of modernism, the contributors decenter art history's traditional Western orientation and prompt a re-evaluation of canonical understandings of twentieth-century art history. Mapping Modernisms is the first book in Modernist Exchanges, a multivolume project dedicated to rewriting the history of modernism and modernist art to include artists, theorists, art forms, and movements from around the world. Contributors. Bill Anthes, Peter Brunt, Karen Duffek, Erin Haney, Elizabeth Harney, Heather Igloliorte, Sandra Klopper, Ian McLean, Anitra Nettleton, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Ruth B. Phillips, W. Jackson Rushing III, Damian Skinner, Nicholas Thomas, Norman Vorano  

Published to coincide with the imminent opening of the beautiful new art galleries at Te Papa, this book takes an intimate yet expert look at the national art collection. Ten art curators each pick ten art works and tell us why they love/admire/revere/are moved by them. It's an entirely fresh way to approach art, through the eyes of those who work with these paintings, prints, photographs, applied art objects and sculptures every day and who know them better than most.

Winner of the 2021 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award Canadian Indigenous Literature and Art sheds light on Indigenous justice perspectives in Indigenous literature and art. Decolonizing education, culture, and society is the revolutionary pulse of this book aimed at educational reform and comprehensive change. Select works of published literature and exhibited art are interpreted in the critical discourse presented. Indigeneity as a lens is used to deconstruct education, accountability, and policy in Canada and globally. A new hypothesis is advanced about colonization and Indigenous voicelessness, helplessness, and genocidal victimhood as unchanging conditions of humanity. Activist pushback is demonstrated in the rise of Indigenous sources originating in global Canada. While colonization dehumanizes Canadian Indigenous peoples, a global movement has erupted, changing pockets of curriculum, teaching, and research. Through agency and solidarity in public life and, gradually, education, Indigenous justice is a mounting paradigmatic force. Indigenous voices speak about colonialism as a crisis of humanity that provokes truth-telling and protest. Glimpses of Indigenous futurity offer new possibilities for decolonizing our globally connected lives. Actionable steps include educating for a just world and integrating Indigenous justice in other advocacy theories. "Compelling, interesting, important, and original. I was impressed with Carol Mullen's knowledge as well as how she wove together this knowledge with both the literature and personal experience throughout this beautifully and soulfully written text. I appreciate how she illuminated spaces and people whose work is often relegated to dark corners." - Pamela J. Konkol, Professor of Foundations, Social Policy, and Research at Concordia University Chicago See inside the book.

This latest philosophical text by John Sallis is inspired by the work of contemporary Chinese painter Cao Jun. It carries out a series of philosophical reflections on nature, art, and music by taking up Cao Jun's art and thought, with a focus on questions of the elemental. Sallis's reflections are not a matter of simply relating art works to philosophical thought, as theoretical insights and developments run throughout Cao Jun's writings and inform many of his artistic works. Sallis maintains abundant points of contact with Chinese philosophical traditions but also with Western philosophy. In these reflections on art, Sallis poses a critique of mimesis and considers the relation of painting to music. He affirms his conviction that the artist must always turn to nature, especially as reflections on the earth and sky delimit the scale and place of what is human. Full-color illustrations enhance this provocative and penetrating text.

From Timur's tent in Samarqand to Shah 'Abbas's palace in Isfahan and Humayun's tomb in Delhi, the pavilion has been an integral part of Persianate gardens since its earliest appearance at the Achaemenid garden in Pasargadae in the sixth century BC. Here, Mohammad Gharipour places both the garden and the pavilion within their historical, literary and artistic contexts, emphasizing the importance of the pavilion, which has hitherto been overlooked in the study of Iranian historical architecture. Starting with an examination of the depictions and representations of gardens in religious texts, Gharipour analyses how the idea of the garden developed from the model of pre-Islamic gardens in Achaemenid and Sassanian Persia to its mentions in the Zoroastrian text of Aban Yasht and on to its central role as paradise in the Qur'an. Continuing on with an exploration of gardens and pavilions in Persian poetry, Gharipour offers in-depth analysis of their literal and metaphorical values. It is in the poetry of major Persian poets such as Ferdowsi, Naser Khosrow, Sa'di, Rumi and Hafez that Gharipour finds that whilst gardens are praised for their spiritual values, they also contain significant symbolic worth in terms of temporal wealth and power. Persian Gardens and Pavilions then goes onto examine the garden and the pavilion as reflected in Persian miniature painting, sculpture and carpets, as well as accounts of travelers to Persia. With masters such as Bizhad representing daily life as well as the more mystical prose and poetry in, for example, Sa'di's Bustan (The Orchard) and Golestan (The Rose Garden), the garden and the pavilion can be seen to have crucial semiotic significance and cultural meanings. But in addition to this, they also point to historical patterns of patronage and ownership which were of central importance in the diplomatic and social life of the royal courts of Persia. Gharipour thereby highlights the metaphorical, spiritual, symbolic and religious aspects of gardens, as well as their more materialistic and economic functions. This book reaches back through Persia's rich history to explore the material and psychological relationships between human beings, pavilions and gardens, and will be a valuable resource for Art History, Architecture and Iranian Studies.

This is the definitive account of the ground-breaking conservation project to conserve the cave paintings of the Mogao Grottoes in China. The Mogao Grottoes, a World Heritage Site in northwestern China, are located along the ancient caravan routes, collectively known as the Silk Road, that once linked China with the West. Founded by a Buddhist monk in the late fourth century, Mogao flourished over the following millennium, as monks, local rulers, and travellers commissioned hundreds of cave temples cut into a mile-long rock cliff and adorned them with vibrant murals. More than 490 decorated grottoes remain, containing thousands of sculptures and some 45,000 square metres of wall paintings, making Mogao one of the world's most significant sites of Buddhist art. In 1997 the Getty Conservation Institute, which had been working with the Dunhuang Academy since 1989, began a case study using the Late-Tang dynasty Cave 85 to develop a methodology that would stabilize the deteriorating wall paintings. This abundantly illustrated volume is the definitive report on the project, which was completed in 2010.