Shamans depicted walking on knives, fairies shown riding on clouds, kings astride dragon mounts: some find such pictures unsettling, some charming. Pursued by collectors, venerated as the seats of gods, Korean shaman paintings are all of these things. Laurel Kendall, Jongsung Yang, and Yul Soo Yoon explore what it is that makes these works magical or sacred-more than """"just paintings."""" What does it mean for a picture to carry the trace of a god? Once animated and revered, can it ever be a mere painting again? How have shaman paintings been revalued as art? Do artfulness and magic ever intersect? Is the market value of a painting influenced by whether or not it was once a sacred object? Navigating the journey shaman paintings make from painters' studios to shaman shrines to private collections and museums, the three authors deftly navigate the borderland between scholarly interests in the production and consumption of material religion and the consumption and circulation of art. Illustrated with sixty images in color and black and white, the book offers a new vantage point on """"the social life of things."""" This is not the story of a collecting West and a disposing rest: the primary collectors and commentators on Korean shaman paintings are South Koreans re-imagining their own past in light of their own modernist sensibility. It is a tale that must be told together with the recent history of South Korea and an awareness of the problematic question of how the paintings are understood by different South Korean actors-most particularly the shamans and collectors who share a common language and sometimes meet face-to-face.

A boxed set containing Every Thread a Story and The Secret Language of Miao Embroidery, this culmination highlights artists and textiles from the Guizhou Province of China. Every Thread a Story is a tribute to ethnic minority artisans of China's Guizhou Province. It is also a tribute to the heritage craft traditions and techniques passed down through the generations of their families. The book introduces more than a dozen contemporary artists from four ethnic groups working in the techniques of their ancestors, including indigo dyers, embroiderers of varying techniques, weavers, a metalsmith, and a paper maker. A wide-ranging look to the future questions the effects of tourism and modern development on the craft and culture of southeast Guizhou Province. The Secret Language of Miao Embroidery presents, for the first-time, expert interpretations of the Miao symbols and motifs embellished on traditional clothing of the Miao peoples of China. Using examples from pieces in a museum's collection, the author provides clear descriptions and stories for 60 symbols and motifs found in highly collectible Miao textiles, focusing on southeast Guizhou Province. Detailed colour photographs accompany each motif. Both are paperback books: Every Thread a Story contains 160 pages and The Secret Language of Miao Embroidery contains 64 pages.

Between 1885 and 1891 the Swiss pastor Wilfried Spinner sojourned in Japan on behalf of the East Asian mission. He founded the first Christian parishes in Tokyo and Yokohama and began to intensively teach there. However, his interest was also directed at local beliefs, which informed the everyday lives of the population. He brought back to Europe around eighty religious scrolls, comprising some painted hanging scrolls and numerous black-and-white prints (ofuda). Ofuda are paper amulets featuring representations of important deities, Buddhas and bodhisattvas, which were printed in and distributed from temples. Some of them additionally feature calligraphy, which was written by the monks in the presence of the pilgrims. They are evidence to their pilgrimage and accompany them onwards as protection and good luck charms. The recently discovered collection of Wilfried Spinner in the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich covers a broad spectrum both figuratively and in content. Text in English, German, and Japanese.

Folk art is now widely recognized as an integral part of the modern Chinese cultural heritage, but in the early twentieth century, awareness of folk art as a distinct category in the visual arts was new. Internationally, intellectuals in different countries used folk arts to affirm national identity and cultural continuity in the midst of the changes of the modern era. In China, artists, critics and educators likewise saw folk art as a potentially valuable resource: perhaps it could be a fresh source of cultural inspiration and energy, representing the authentic voice of the people in contrast to what could be seen as the limited and elitist classical tradition. At the same time, many Chinese intellectuals also saw folk art as a problem: they believed that folk art, as it was, promoted superstitious and backward ideas that were incompatible with modernization and progress. In either case, folk art was too important to be left in the hands of the folk: educated artists and researchers felt a responsibility intervene, to reform folk art and create new popular art forms that would better serve the needs of the modern nation. In the early 1930s, folk art began to figure in the debates on social role of art and artists that were waged in the pages of the Chinese press, the first major exhibition of folk art was held in Hangzhou, and the new print movement claimed the print as a popular artistic medium while, for the most part, declaring its distance from contemporary folk printmaking practices. During the war against Japan, from 1937 to 1945, educated artists deployed imagery and styles drawn from folk art in morale-boosting propaganda images, but worried that this work fell short of true artistic accomplishment and pandering to outmoded tastes. The questions raised in interaction with folk art during this pivotal period, questions about heritage, about the social position of art, and the exercise of cultural authority continue to resonate into the present day.

Step into a Burmese temple built between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries and you are surrounded by a riot of color and imagery. The majority of the highly detailed wall paintings display Buddhist biographical narratives, inspiring the devotees to follow the Buddha's teachings. Alexandra Green goes one step further to consider the temples and their contents as a whole, arguing that the wall paintings mediate the relationship between the architecture and the main Buddha statues in the temples. This forges a unified space for the devotees to interact with the Buddha and his community, with the aim of transforming the devotees' current and future lives. These temples were a cohesively articulated and represented Burmese Buddhist world to which the devotees belonged. Green's visits to more than 160 sites with identifiable subject matter form the basis of this richly illustrated volume, which draws upon art historical, anthropological, and religious studies methodologies to analyze the wall paintings and elucidate the contemporary religious, political, and social concepts that drove the creation of this lively art form.

Japanese Art: Critical and Primary Sources is a four-volume reference work offering a critical overview of the history and culture of Japanese art. Drawing upon a wide range of English-language texts, the volumes explore the diverse and changing material and visual cultures of Japan from the pre-modern period to the present day. Over 75 essays from Asia, North America and Europe are assembled in this set and they address four major themes - material cultures (Buddhist objects, ceramics, textiles, interiors), visual cultures (painting, calligraphy, photography), printed matter (wood-block prints, books) and the context for Japan's art history (networks of patronage, sites of artistic production and consumption). Each volume is separately introduced and the selected materials are presented thematically, and chronologically within categories. Together the four volumes of Japanese Art present a major scholarly resource for the field.