The paintings of contemporary Thai artist Pichai Nirand (b. 1936) are a vivid exploration of the interplay between Thailand's Buddhist roots and its modern aspirations and struggles. Pichai engages fully with the world and belief system around him. Accompanying the full-color paintings is an incisive examination of the Thai moral and social themes of Pichai's paintings in terms of the Buddhist cycle of life. Philip Constable's sensitive analysis of the social, political, economic, and moral dimensions affecting the artist, coupled with careful reference to other contemporary Thai artists, illuminates the deep meaning and expression behind each painting. This book showcases a celebrated Thai artist who has spent a lifetime providing a Thai Buddhist perspective on the dilemmas and contradictions of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

A remarkable group of seven bronze figures was unearthed in Kampong Cham province, Cambodia, in 2006. These sixth- and seventh-century Buddhist sculptures, two of which were Chinese, ultimately were acquired by the National Museum of Cambodia. There they became one of the first projects of the institution's Metal Conservation Laboratory, created with the assistance of the Department of Conservation and Scientific Research at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.

"Gods of Angkor" celebrates not only the collaborative efforts of the Cambodian and U.S. museums to restore and interpret these important images, but also the accomplishments of Khmer bronze casters from the fourth century BCE to the fourteenth century CE. The authors decipher the makeup and meaning of bronze figural images, ritual vessels, and other objects, placing them in the context of Southeast Asian life and worship from prehistoric times through the pre-Angkorian and Angkorian eras. Together, the bronzes reveal vivid details of the significance of this important medium within Khmer culture and of the artistic and religious interactions of the Khmer with their neighbors.

Louise Allison Cort is curator of ceramics and Paul Jett is head of the Department of Conservation and Scientific Research, both at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, D.C. Other contributors include Ian C. Glover, John Guy, and Hiram Woodward Jr.

This volume commemorates a new exhibition of Burmese artifacts at the Musee Guimet in Paris and showcases the vibrant art and manuscript traditions of Myanmar. The central pieces displayed in the exhibition were three richly illustrated manuscripts called parabaiks. These vivid paintings, which show lively festivals and the pageantry of daily religious and courtly life, are a window into the culture and customs of nineteenth-century Burma. Also in the exhibition were a number of other manuscripts, inscriptions, diagrams, and even an ornate wooden model of a traditional Burmese monastery. The accompanying essays-translated from the original French exhibition booklet-explore complexities of the Burmese language, manuscript production, and background of the exhibited items as well as explaining the festivities and other spirited scenes illustrated in the parabaiks.

Ink, Silk, and Gold explores the dynamic and complex traditions of Islamic art through more than 115 major works in a dazzling array of media, reproduced in full color and exquisite detail - manuscripts inscribed with gold, paintings on silk, elaborate metalwork, intricately woven textiles, luster-painted ceramics, and more. These objects, which originated within an Islamic world that ranges from Western Europe to Indonesia and across more than thirteen centuries, share a distinctive relationship to the materials they are made of: their color, shape, texture, and technique of production all convey meaning. Enhanced by texts from an international team of scholars and drawing on the latest technical information, Ink, Silk, and Gold is an inviting introduction to the riches of the Islamic art collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a window into a vibrant global culture.

The V&A has the UK's largest permanent display of Japanese art, housing objects from the 6th century to the present day. Collecting Japanese objects from its founding in 1852, the Museum has played a significant role in bringing the art of Japan to the attention of designers, manufacturers and the British public. This tradition continues to the present day, and in this new book some of the world's leading researchers in the field bring their attention to the V&A's unparalleled collection. Ten chapters focus on subjects including religion and ritual; samurai military and aristocratic culture; the highly aestheticized tea ceremony, which has been a notable feature of Japanese culture from the Medieval period to the present day; Edo-period urban fashions including lacquer and fashionable dress; Ukiyo-e and the graphic arts (prints, illustrated books, paintings, screens and contemporary photography); exchanges with the West and participation in world exhibitions, right up to modern and contemporary crafts and product design, including high-tech design.

Early China is best known for the dazzling material artifacts it has left behind. These terracotta figures, gilt-bronze lamps, and other material remnants of the Chinese past unearthed by archaeological excavations are often viewed without regard to the social context of their creation, yet they were made by individuals who contributed greatly to the foundations of early Chinese culture. With Artisans in Early Imperial China, Anthony Barbieri-Low combines historical, epigraphic, and archaeological analysis to refocus our gaze from the glittering objects and monuments of China onto the men and women who made them. Taking readers inside the private workshops, crowded marketplaces, and great palaces, temples, and tombs of early China, Barbieri-Low explores the lives and working conditions of artisans, meticulously documenting their role in early Chinese society and the economy. First published in 2007, winner of top prizes from the Association for Asian Studies, American Historical Association, College Art Association, and the International Convention of Asia Scholars, and now back in print, Artisans in Early Imperial China will appeal to anyone interested in Chinese history, as well as to scholars of comparative social history, labor history, and Asian art history.

The northern Chinese mountain range of Mount Wutai has been a preeminent site of international pilgrimage for over a millennium. Home to more than one hundred temples, the entire range is considered a Buddhist paradise on earth, and has received visitors ranging from emperors to monastic and lay devotees. Mount Wutai explores how Qing Buddhist rulers and clerics from Inner Asia, including Manchus, Tibetans, and Mongols, reimagined the mountain as their own during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Wen-Shing Chou examines a wealth of original source materials in multiple languages and media--many never before published or translated-such as temple replicas, pilgrimage guides, hagiographic representations, and panoramic maps. She shows how literary, artistic, and architectural depictions of the mountain permanently transformed the site's religious landscape and redefined Inner Asia's relations with China. Chou addresses the pivotal but previously unacknowledged history of artistic and intellectual exchange between the varying religious, linguistic, and cultural traditions of the region. The reimagining of Mount Wutai was a fluid endeavor that proved central to the cosmopolitanism of the Qing Empire, and the mountain range became a unique site of shared diplomacy, trade, and religious devotion between different constituents, as well as a spiritual bridge between China and Tibet. A compelling exploration of the changing meaning and significance of one of the world's great religious sites, Mount Wutai offers an important new framework for understanding Buddhist sacred geography.

Revealing what is 'Islamic' in Islamic art, Shaw explores the perception of arts, including painting, music, and geometry through the discursive sphere of historical Islam including the Qur'an, Hadith, Sufism, ancient philosophy, and poetry. Emphasis on the experience of reception over the context of production enables a new approach, not only to Islam and its arts, but also as a decolonizing model for global approaches to art history. Shaw combines a concise introduction to Islamic intellectual history with a critique of the modern, secular, and European premises of disciplinary art history. Her meticulous interpretations of intertextual themes span antique philosophies, core religious and theological texts, and prominent prose and poetry in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu that circulated across regions of Islamic hegemony from the eleventh century to the colonial and post-colonial contexts of the modern Middle East.

Chinese-Islamic studies have concentrated thus far on the arts of earlier periods with less attention paid to works from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912). This book focuses on works of Chinese-Islamic art from the late seventeenth century to the present day and bring to the reader's attention several new areas for consideration. The book examines glass wares which were probably made for a local Chinese-Muslim clientele, illustrating a fascinating mixture of traditional Chinese and Muslim craft traditions. While the inscriptions on them can be related directly to the mosque lamps of the Arab world, their form and style of decoration is characteristically that of Han Chinese. Several contemporary Chinese Muslim artists have succeeded in developing a unique fusion of calligraphic styles from both cultures. Other works examined include enamels, porcelains, and interior painted snuff bottles, with emphasis on either those with Arabic inscriptions, or on works by Chinese Muslim artists. The book includes a chapter written by Dr. Shelly Xue and an addendum written by Dr. Riccardo Joppert. This book will appeal to scholars working in art history, religious studies, Chinese studies, Chinese history, religious history, and material culture.

This book is the first in a major three-volume series that will survey China's immense wealth of art, architecture, and artifacts from prehistoric times to the twentieth century. The Arts of China to A.D. 900 investigates the beginnings of the traditions on which much of the art rests, moving from Neolithic and Bronze Age China to the era of the Tang Dynasty around A.D. 900. William Watson discusses in lively detail a wide range of art forms and techniques: porcelain and pottery, lacquer, religious and secular painting and sculpture, mural painting, monumental sculpture and architecture. He explains the materials and techniques of bronze casting, jade carving, pottery manufacture, and other arts, and he describes the most important sites, the artifacts that were produced at each one, and the historical interactions between different areas. He discusses the iconography, the technique and the function of every art form. Written by one of the most distinguished scholars in the field of Chinese art and archaeology, this lavishly illustrated book will be a valuable resource for both experts and beginners in the field.

The art of Japanese woodblock printing, known as ukiyo-e ("pictures of the floating world"), reflects the rich history and way of life in Japan hundreds of years ago. Ukiyo-e: The Art of the Japanese Print takes a thematic approach to this iconic Japanese art form, considering prints by subject matter: geisha and courtesans, kabuki actors, sumo wrestlers, erotica, nature, historical subjects and even images of foreigners in Japan. An artist himself, author Frederick Harris--a well-known American collector who lived in Japan for 50 years--pays special attention to the methods and materials employed in Japanese printmaking. The book traces the evolution of ukiyo-e from its origins in metropolitan Edo (Tokyo) art culture as black and white illustrations, to delicate two-color prints and multicolored designs. Advice to admirers on how to collect, care for, view and buy Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints rounds out this book of charming, carefully selected prints.

Oriental Lifestyle will take you on a journey that explores astonishing artistic and architectural worlds, captured by a poetic eye. Like an enchanter, Guillaume de Laubier brings the ochre of the desert alive and highlights the splendour and wonders of palaces and residences rich in ancestral knowledge and history. We discover the beautiful diversity of the Orient-Occident alliance, which has given birth to an innovative and colourful style of decoration. We stop in front of the skyscrapers, museums, and modern villas that are revolutionising architecture and design in the Arab world. This is a book that celebrates the diversity of the art of living, architecture and design in the East today, from Egypt to Tunisia, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and also Mauritania and Morocco. Text in English and French.

In this expansive study, John Clark draws on decades of his research on modern art cultures across Asia from 1850 to the present day. The Asian Modern uses an artist-centric approach, by way of meticulous case studies, to create a new comparative paradigm for the narration of art. “Affiliations of place,” claims John Clark, rather than “genealogies of time,” is key to clarifying the category of “the Asian Modern.” [...] The transfer is from an extractive art history obsessed with pedigree and derivations, on the one hand, to a redistributive art history, on the other, that is possible only through the reciprocities and fundamental obligations between persons and things. Absent the latter, there can be no future for art history in Asia. —Patrick D. Flores, Professor of Art Studies, University of the Philippines, introduction to The Asian Modern

This volume offers an account of recent and current art made in Hong Kong in the years leading up to the handover of British sovereignty to China in 1997. This process differed from many other experiences of the post-colonial elsewhere in the world in that it did not end in independence but in absorption into a much larger entity with an entirely different political system. Until now, the cultural aspects of this transition have not been given the attention they deserve, apart perhaps from the analysis of film. The author addresses this by considering a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, photography, video and installation, as well as other kinds of visual production such as architecture, fashion, graphic design and graffiti. He shows how the approach of the handover heightened a sense of local identity, and how this found expression in the politicized art that became common at the time.

This stunning exhibition unveils the remarkable art and historical legacy of two mysterious kingdoms of ancient China. Phoenix Kingdoms brings to life the distinctive Bronze Age cultures that flourished along the middle course of the Yangzi River in South Central China about 2,500 years ago. With over 150 objects on loan from five major Chinese museums, Phoenix Kingdoms explores the artistic and spiritual landscape of the southern borderland of the Zhou dynasty, featuring remarkable archaeological finds unearthed from aristocratic tombs of the phoenix-worshipping Zeng and Chu kingdoms. By revealing the splendid material cultures of these legendary states, whose history has only recently been recovered, Phoenix Kingdoms highlights the importance of this region in forming a southern style that influenced centuries of Chinese art. This exhibition catalogue includes six essays that contextualize the stylistically rich material-mythical creatures, elaborate patterns, and elegant forms-and introduces readers to the technologically and artistically sophisticated cultures that thrived before China's first empire. Lavishly illustrated with over 240 images, Phoenix Kingdoms showcases works from the exhibition across six categories-jades, bronze ritual vessels, musical instruments and weapons, lacquerware for luxury and ceremony, funerary bronze and wood objects, and textiles and unique objects featuring distinctive designs-many of which are considered national treasures. Published in association with the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.

This is the first monograph on the subject to be published in English. It comprises 130 full-colour plates of shaman gods. Supported by two introductory chapters 'Reflections on Shaman God Paintings and Shamanism' by Kim Tae-gon, and 'The Shaman God Paintings as an Icon and Its Artistic Qualities' by Bak Yong-suk, both distinguished authorities in the study of Korean Shamanism, The Paintings of Korean Shaman Gods offers a very accessible introduction to understanding Korean shamanism and its art. The Paintings of Korean Shaman Gods broad appeal will be welcomed by both specialists and generalists in the fields of Asian Studies, Art History and Cultural and Religious Studies.