A translation of Professor Boisselier's original work. This monograph discusses twenty-four sculptures representative of Khmer art. Includes brief chapters on the history and religions of Cambodia as background for understanding the discussion of the statuary itself, as well as beautiful black-and-white reproductions and a glossary.

The Kisokaido route through Japan was ordained in the early 1600s by the country's then-ruler Tokugawa Ieyasu, who decreed that staging posts be installed along the length of the arduous passage between Edo (present-day Tokyo) and Kyoto. Inns, shops, and restaurants were established to provide sustenance and lodging to weary travelers. In 1835, renowned woodblock print artist Keisai Eisen was commissioned to create a series of works to chart the Kisokaido journey. After producing 24 prints, Eisen was replaced by Utagawa Hiroshige, who completed the series of 70 prints in 1838. Both Eisen and Hiroshige were master print practitioners. In The Sixty-Nine Stations along the Kisokaido, we find the artists' distinct styles as much as their shared expertise. From the busy starting post of Nihonbashi to the castle town of Iwamurata, Eisen opts for a more muted palette but excels in figuration, particularly of glamorous women, and relishes snapshots of activity along the route, from shoeing a horse to winnowing rice. Hiroshige demonstrates his mastery of landscape with grandiose and evocative scenes, whether it's the peaceful banks of the Ota River, the forbidding Wada Pass, or a moonlit ascent between Yawata and Mochizuki. Taken as a whole, The Sixty-Nine Stations collection represents not only a masterpiece of woodblock practice, including bold compositions and an experimental use of color, but also a charming tapestry of 19th-century Japan, long before the specter of industrialization. This TASCHEN XXL edition revives the series with due scale and splendor. Sourced from the only-known set of a near-complete run of the first edition of the series, this legendary publication is reproduced in optimum quality, bound in the Japanese tradition and with uncut paper. A perfect companion piece to TASCHEN's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, it is at once a visual delight and a major artifact from the bygone era of Imperial Japan.

Available in a limited print run of 1,000 sets-the stunning nine-volume presentation of the incredible Buddhist caves at Dunhuang in northwestern China Situated at an important juncture within the network of silk routes from China through central Asia, the oasis city of Dunhuang was an ancient site of Buddhist religious activity. Southeast of the city, the Mogao Caves, also known as the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, are an astonishing group of hundreds of caves-carved in the cliffs between the fourth and fourteenth centuries-containing sculptures and paintings. Further east sit the Yulin Caves, another critical and richly decorated site. Featuring some of the finest examples of Buddhist imagery to be found anywhere in the world, these caves have enticed explorers, archaeologists, artists, scholars, and photographers since the early twentieth century. Visualizing Dunhuang: The Lo Archive Photographs of the Mogao and Yulin Caves presents for the first time in print the comprehensive photographic archive-created in the 1940s by James C. M. Lo (1902-1987) and his wife, Lucy L. Lo (b. 1920)-of the remarkable Buddhist caves at Dunhuang. This extraordinary nine-volume set features more than 3,000 of the original black-and-white photographs that provide an indispensable historical record. Invaluable for their documentary worth and artistic quality, and thorough in their coverage and clarity, the images represent a rare perspective on significant monuments, many now irretrievably changed. The Lo Archive serves as a treasure trove of historical, cultural, and artistic information for researchers, art historians, and conservators. The introductory volume includes an essay about the formation and history of the Lo Archive, as well as maps, diagrams, photographs of the Mogao site, and concordances. The central volumes contain photographs of the Mogao and Yulin Caves, collaged photographs, several hundred newly created diagrammatic plans, and English and Chinese captions. The final volume is a collection of essays that addresses the complexity and richness of the Lo Archive, and how Dunhuang has been viewed from ancient times to the present. Contributors include Neville Agnew, Dora Ching, Jun Hu, Annette Juliano, Richard Kent, Wei-Cheng Lin, Cary Liu, Maria Menshikova, Jerome Silbergeld, Roderick Whitfield, and Zhao Shengliang. Exquisitely produced, this monumental set's abundant photographs have been lavishly printed as tritones, allowing for the closest possible match to James Lo's original black-and-white photographs, and for the clearest, richest images possible. With numerous silk-screened pages and an eight-page double-sided gatefold, Visualizing Dunhuang stands as a definitive reference for scholars, collectors, and libraries in art history and Asian studies. Published in association with the Tang Center for East Asian Art, Princeton University

Chinoiserie—the use of motifs, materials, and techniques considered “Chinese� in ceramics, furniture, interior design, and landscape architecture—has often been associated with courtly decadence and shallow escapism. In Siting China in Germany, Christiane Hertel challenges conventional assumptions about this art form by developing a fresh, complex perspective on collections, gardens, and literature in the long eighteenth century. From the extraordinary porcelain palaces at Dresden and Rastatt and the gardens of Wilhelmsthal and Wilhelmshöhe in Kassel to the literary and artistic translation practices in Dresden and Thomas Mann's historical novel Lotte in Weimar, Hertel interprets the extensive history of chinoiserie within but also beyond court culture. In particular, her study focuses on how manifestations of chinoiserie in Germany oscillated between the imagination, judgment, and critique of cultural and historical difference as well as identity. Hertel’s erudite analysis of the cultural significance of German chinoiserie will interest art historians and scholars of Orientalism, German Sinophilia, and German Sinophobia.

Architecture and urban planning have always been used by political regimes to stamp their ideologies upon cities, and this is especially the case in the modern Turkish Republic. By exploring Istanbul's modern architectural and urban history, Murat Gul highlights the dynamics of political and social change in Turkey from the late-Ottoman period until today. Looking beyond pure architectural styles or the physical manifestations of Istanbul's cultural landscape, he offers critical insight into how Turkish attempts to modernise have affected both the city and its population. Charting the diverse forces evident in Istanbul's urban fabric, the book examines late Ottoman reforms, the Turkish Republic's turn westward for inspiration, Cold War alliances and the AK Party's reaffirmation of cultural ties with the Middle East and the Balkans. Telltale signs of these moments - revivalist architecture drawing on Ottoman and Seljuk styles, 1930s Art Deco, post-war International Style buildings and the proliferation of shopping malls, luxurious gated residences and high-rise towers, for example - are analysed and illustrated in extensive detail.Connecting this rich history to present-day Istanbul, whose urban development is characterised anew by intense social stratification, the book will appeal to researchers of Turkey, its architecture and urban planning.

This is the ninth part of the successful series supervised by Aiko Mabuchi, Director General, The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, which provide art historians and students with the primary source materials related to the reception of Japanese arts from late nineteenth-century to early twentieth century in the Western societies. All materials are reproduced in facsimile reprint and include many plates and illustrations in colour. This new collection includes writings by James Lord Bowes on Japanese arts. Bowes (1834-1899) was a wealthy Japanese art collector in Liverpool and was appointed the first foreign-born Japanese Consul in Great Britain. He opened Bowes Museum which was the first dedicated museum of Japanese art in the western world and is regarded as one of the most important figures in the British reception of Japanese art and culture in the Victorian era. Volume 1-4 of the five-volume reprint set covers his writings on Japan and Japanese arts and the catalogues of Bowes museum which he edited and published himself. Also included is a very rare catalogue of auction which was held after his death and is the only source of information of one of the largest collection of Japanese art of the time. The last volume is a facsimile reprint of the monumental work of Japanese ceramic art which was originally published in two volumes and includes approx.110 plates in colour.

This richly illustrated book showcases a previously unseen and virtually unknown historical collection of Chinese ceramics, formed in the early twentieth century by George Eumorfopoulos, a pivotal figure in the appreciate of Asian art. Taken together, these artifacts, now located at the Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece, build a rare time capsule of Western tastes and preoccupations with the East in the decades prior to World War II. The years between the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and the establishment of the People s Republic of China in 1949 marked an opening up of China to the rest of the world and coincided with the first archaeological excavations of the country s early cultures. Working at the time in London, a center of imperialist power and global finance, Eumorfopoulos and his colleagues were instrumental in acquiring, assessing, interpreting, and manipulating the unearthed objects. The years of isolation that followed this period allowed aspects of his approach to become canonical, influencing later scholarly research on Chinese material culture.This groundbreaking exploration of approximately one hundred artifacts is not only an important account of Eumorfopoulos s work, but also a story about China and the West and the role antique materials played in their cultural interplay. "

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.

This two-volume publication represents the only comprehensive documentation of one of the finest private collections of Asian art in the world. More than 1,000 works of art are shown in exquisite color reproductions, along with a special reference section of illustrated and translated texts, signatures, and seals. Since the collection will be dispersed for public use, "Art Through a Lifetime" provides the only opportunity for scholars, students, and admirers of Asian art to enjoy it in its entirety.

The first volume of this boxed set, Japanese Painting, Printed Works, Calligraphy, presents Japanese paintings, printed works, and calligraphy that date from the Nara period to the late 20th century. The second volume, Japanese Objects, Korean Art, Chinese Art, presents the remainder of the Japanese works--ceramics, lacquer, metalwork, sculpture, and textiles--along with an extensive array of Korean and Chinese works of art.

Miyeko Murase is professor emerita of Japanese art at Columbia University and special consultant to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Soyoung Lee is associate curator for Korean art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. David Ake Sensabaugh is the Ruth and Bruce Dayton Curator of Asian Art, Yale University Art Gallery. Shi-yee Liu, senior research associate in the Department of Asian Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, provided translations.

The volume presents for the first time four seventeenth-century paintings commissioned by the Habsburg Ambassador Hans-Ludwig von Kuefstein after his diplomatic mission to Istanbul, accompanied by twelve gouache works from a collection in Austria. In spite of its diplomatic and political success in the Ottoman-Habsburg relations, the Kuefste in's embassy is remembered first of all for its artistic legacy documented by the ambassador's diary, the draft of a final report to the Emperor, diplomatic correspondence, a list of gifts presented and received, and last but not least, a series of gouaches, executed in Istanbul, and a series of oil paintings - which serve to illustrate various aspects of seventeenth-century Ottoman life, and provide a detailed account of the ambassador's mission. The Orientalist Museum of Qatar curatorial and conservation departments, with the assistance of external scientific experts, have embarked upon a collaborative project to provide new insights in to the history of the Ottoman-Habsburg relations. The result is the exhibition and the volume Heritage of Art Diplomacy: Memoirs of an Ambassador- the culmination of two years' restoration and research work aimed to provide a better understanding of the cultural heritage in respect to its aesthetic and historic significance and its physical integrity .

Plotting the Prince traces the development of conceptual maps of the world created through the telling of stories about Prince Shotoku (573?-622?), an eminent statesman who is credited with founding Buddhism in Japan. It analyses his place in the sacred landscape and the material relics of the cult of personality dedicated to him, focusing on the art created from the tenth to fourteenth centuries. The book asks not only who Shotoku was, but also how images of his life served the needs of devotees in early medieval Japan. Even today Shotoku evokes images of a half-real, half-mythical figure who embodied the highest political, social, and religious ideals. Taking up his story about four centuries after his death, this study traces the genesis and progression of Shotoku's sacred personas in art to illustrate their connection to major religious centres such as Shitenno-ji and Horyu-ji. It argues that mapping and storytelling are sister acts-both structuring the world in subtle but compelling ways-that combined in visual narratives of Shotoku's life to shape conceptions of religious legitimacy, communal history, and sacred geography. Plotting the Prince introduces much new material and presents provocative interpretations that call upon art historians to rethink fundamental conceptions of narrative and cultic imagery. It offers social and political historians a textured look at the creation of communal identities on both local and state levels, scholars of religion a substantially new way of understanding key developments in doctrine and practice, and those studying the past in general a clear instance of visual hagiography taking precedence over the textual tradition.

Between war, diplomatic relations and political changes, precious objects were transferred across borders, whether as gifts or war booty, and artists pursued careers from one workshop to another. With this interaction, an entirely new distinctive range of motifs emerged, referencing and building upon earlier Islamic tradition and foreign artistic influences. Through the high level of patronage and artistic craftsmanship, patrons and artists succeeded in shaping this cultural exchange. Text in English and Arabic.

Beginning in late Edo, the Japanese faced a rapidly and irreversibly changing world in which industrialization, westernization, and internationalization was exerting pressure upon an entrenched traditional culture. The Japanese themselves felt threatened by Western powers, with their sense of superiority and military might. Yet, the Japanese were more prepared to meet this challenge than was thought at the time, and they used a variety of strategies to address the tension between modernity and tradition. Inexorable Modernity illuminates our understanding of how Japan has dealt with modernity and of what mechanisms, universal and local, we can attribute to the mode of negotiation between tradition and modernity in three major forms of art-theater, the visual arts, and literature. Dr. Hiroshi Nara brings together a thoughtful collection of essays that demonstrate that traditional and modern approaches to life feed off of one other, and tradition, whether real or created, was sought out in order to find a way to live with the burden of modernity. Inexorable Modernity is a valuable and enlightening read for those interested in Asian studies and history.

Is there something unique about Islamic art? This book argues that there is not -- that Islam does not play an leading role in the aesthetic judgements that we should make about objects created in the Islamic world. It is often argued that a very special sort of consciousness went into creating Islamic art, that it is very different from other forms of art, that Muslims are not allowed to portray human beings in their art, and that calligraphy is the supreme Islamic art form. Oliver Leaman challenges all these ideas, showing them to be misguided. Instead he suggests that the sort of criteria we should apply to Islamic art are identical to the criteria applicable to art in general, and that the attempt to put Islamic art into a special category is a result of orientalism Key Features: *Criticises the influence of Sufism on Islamic aesthetics *Deals with issues arising in painting, calligraphy, architecture, gardens, literature, films, and music *Pays close attention to the Qur'an *Argument includes examples from history, art, philosophy, theology and the artefacts of the Islamic world The reader is invited to view Islamic art as no more and no less than ordinary art, neither better nor worse than anything else that counts as art. It follows that there are no special techniques required in Islamic aesthetics as compared with any other form of aesthetics.

'Oishii!' - 'Delicious!' is the most common word in Japan to describe food. Expressing culinary taste goes hand in hand with the social and cultural identity of those eating it. Hence food is much more than nutrition; rather it is tied to all areas of human life and illustrates the various aspects of a society and its culture. Against this backdrop renowned authors devote themselves to Japanese food and drink culture. How is rice cultivated? How do you catch bonitos? What is the secret to good sake and how did green tea become a lifestyle product? Hitherto partly undisclosed treasures from the Linden-Museum Stuttgart and valuable examples from home and abroad draw attention to the rich material culture of food and drink in Japan. Text in German.

Closely examining staged images of Japanese femininity, this study centers on the mid-Meiji souvenir photography of Kusakabe Kimbei, approaching from the artist's perspective while referencing his culture's visual and traditional practices. The analysis attempts to construe visual material in its original context using various points of departure, including the sociocultural significance of the staged models, the visual display of the photographic models in relation to the visibility problem of Japanese women in Meiji visual media, and Kimbei's visual encodings of Japanese femininity. By means of contextualized analysis, this survey seeks to illuminate the intricate structure of significations embedded on the visual plane, ultimately demonstrating how Kimbei's female images present a locus of multilayered meanings.

Liu Kang (1911-2004) and Ho Ho Ying (1936-) are important painters in Singapore's art history. But along with their creative practices, they also played key roles as art writers and critics. Their opposing positions on modernism and abstraction, and the debate and discussion generated between them, both shaped and reflected Singapore's art scene through the 1950s, 60s and 70s and well into the 1980s. These selected writings, mostly drawn from the Chinese-language press, and now translated into English, vividly document important phases in Singapore's art history. The editorial team of T. K. Sabapathy, and Cheo Chai-Hiang has an unparalleled understanding of the critical landscape in which Singapore's art has developed over the years. Cheo's introduction of Liu Kang and Ho Ho Ying as writers establishes certain key themes in the relationship between art and criticism in Singapore and Southeast Asia, with its many artist-writers and artist-critics. Those in Singapore's art world often assume that they work, write and read in a critical vacuum, but as this book shows, this conclusion is far from the truth.