The Van Gogh Museum invited the celebrated Chinese artist Zeng Fanzhi to present recent work inspired by Vincent van Gogh. Although the two artists differ greatly in historical period and place of origin, their art is very similar in substance. This similarity is apparent in the themes that Van Gogh and Zeng both perpetually explore, such as style, identity and personality, and the question of self-control and the outside world's degree of control over the individual. It is evident too in their powerful, searing paintings. Van Gogh's original paintings became famous partly for their vigorous, seemingly inimitable brushwork - the painter's individual 'handwriting'. Zeng has responded to this same brushwork with handwriting from a very different cultural tradition, namely that of Chinese calligraphy. He has done so at a time when Van Gogh has become immensely popular in countries like China and Japan. The result is a Van Gogh seen through Chinese eyes, in a way Vincent himself could never have imagined. Zeng takes meanings from the past and reuses them, over and over again, to generate valuable new meanings. This book focuses on Zeng's recent work, inspired by Van Gogh's iconic self-portraits, and explores the position and importance of the self-portrait within his oeuvre. Text in English and Chinese.

Challenging cliches of Japanism as a feminine taste, Bachelor Japanists argues that Japanese aesthetics were central to contests over the meanings of masculinity in the West. Christopher Reed draws attention to the queerness of Japanist communities of writers, collectors, curators, and artists in the tumultuous century between the 1860s and the 1960s. Reed combines extensive archival research; analysis of art, architecture, and literature; the insights of queer theory; and an appreciation of irony to explore the East-West encounter through three revealing artistic milieus: the Goncourt brothers and other japonistes of late-nineteenth-century Paris; collectors and curators in turn-of-the-century Boston; and the mid-twentieth-century circles of artists associated with Seattle's Mark Tobey. The result is a groundbreaking integration of well-known and forgotten episodes and personalities that illuminates how Japanese aesthetics were used to challenge Western gender conventions. These disruptive effects are sustained in Reed's analysis, which undermines conventional scholarly investments in the heroism of avant-garde accomplishment and ideals of cultural authenticity.

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.

With contributions from outstanding specialists in glass art and East Asian art history, this edited volume opens a cross-cultural dialogue on the hitherto little-studied medium of Chinese reverse glass painting. The first major survey of this form of East Asian art, the volume traces its long history, its local and global diffusion, and its artistic and technical characteristics. Manufactured for export to Europe and for local consumption within China, the fragile artworks studied in this volume constitute a paramount part of Chinese visual culture and attest to the intensive cultural and artistic exchange between China and the West. With contributions by Thierry Audric, Kee Il Choi Jr., Patrick Conner, Karina H. Corrigan, Elisabeth Eibner, Patricia F. Ferguson, Lihong Liu, William H. Ma, Alina Martimyanova, Christopher L. Maxwell, Rupprecht Mayer, Jessica Lee Patterson, Michaela Pejcochova, Jerome Samuel, Hans Bjarne Thomsen, Jan van Campen, Rosalien van der Poel

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. "

No other civilization in the pre-modern world was more obsessed with creating underground burial structures than the Chinese. For at least five thousand years, from the fourth millennium BCE to the early twentieth century, Chinese people devoted an extraordinary amount of wealth and labor to building tombs and furnishing them with exquisite objects and images. In art history these ancient burial sites have mainly been appreciated as 'treasure troves' of exciting and often previously unknown works of art. New trends in Chinese art history are challenging this way of studying funerary art: now an entire memorial site--rather than any of its individual components--has become the focus of both observation and interpretation. "The Art of the Yellow Springs" expands on this scholarship by making interpretative methods the direct subject of consideration. It argues that to achieve a genuine understanding of Chinese tombs we need to reconsider a host of art-historical concepts, including visuality, viewership, space, formal analysis, function, and context. Profusely illustrated with many outstanding works of art, this ground-breaking new assessment demonstrates the amazing richness of arguably the longest and most persistent tradition in the entirety of Chinese art.

This landmark study is the first comprehensive exploration of the `Proportioned Script', an Arabic writing system attributed to the Abbasid wazir (minister) Ibn Muqla and the master scribe Ibn al-Bawwab that has dominated the art of Arabic and Islamic penmanship from the 10th century to the present day. Volume One, `Sources and Principles of the Geometry of Letters', traces the origin of the Proportioned Script to the cross-cultural encounter between Greek learning and the scientific, artistic and philosophical pursuits of classical Islam. On the basis of instructions in surviving sources it identifies a grid module that serves as a common foundation for the design of all the Arabic letter shapes. In Volume Two, `From Geometric Pattern to Living Form', the authors construct each of the letter shapes on the grid module and compare their findings to samples traced by two classical master scribes. They conclude by examining the religious, aesthetic and cosmological significance of the Proportioned Script in the wider context of the Islamic cultural heritage. Drs Moustafa and Sperl have succeeded in unearthing the very foundations of Arabic penmanship, with implications for the arts of Islam as a whole.

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.

The Arts of China after 1620 concludes a major three-volume survey that examines China's huge wealth of art, architecture and artefacts from prehistoric times to the present. Beginning with discussions of 'fine' art and painting and progressing to analysis of carving and sculpture, ceramics, glassware and textiles, the authors demonstrate how, in the age of the Emperors Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong, the 'decorative' arts rose to a prominence quite unlike the western experience. Avoiding misrepresentative categorization, they single out period styles, as well as identifying repeated phases of archaism and Buddhist art, and discuss characteristic groups of jade, ivory, ceramics, glassware and textiles. They consider the importance of the imperial workshops and their role in developing craftsmen's skills and encouraging the cross-over of techniques from different disciplines and they present the compelling influence of Emperor Qianlong's aesthetic innovations. buildings contrasts with the restrained subtlety of domestic architecture and garden design where magnificent rocks were the principal feature, just as in landscape painting. The survey concludes by examining the development of East/West trade and the effects of commercialization on Chinese arts and crafts. This handsome, well-illustrated book provides a scholarly and illuminating resource for all students of the arts of China.

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.

The baskets, blankets, rugs, pottery, jewellery, sandpaintings, dolls, and beadwork created by the Native Americans of the Southwest are all so unique and fascinating. This book is a good introduction to the work that goes into the creations.

This text looks at the role of art in the Indian subcontinent and then analyzes early art from the Indus civilization (2000 BC) to the time of Buddha (c.5000 BC). The Mauryan emperor Ashoka (4th century BC), was an important player in the dissemination of Buddhism, using art to this end. A stable economic base and the rise of a mercantile community were important in Buddhism's growth. Inscriptions show that the contributions to pay for art came from housewives, householders, merchants, traders and a range of other common people. The vibrant narrative tradition displayed in this art is analyzed.

During the Ming Dynasty numerous new animal themes were created to convey political and ethical messages current at court. As the result a sophisticated language of Chinese animal painting was developed, employing both the animals' symbolic associations and homonymic puns. Hou-mei Sung's exciting rediscovery of some of these lost meanings has led to a full-scale investigation of the evolving history of Chinese animal painting. Distinct symbolic meanings were associated with individual motifs, but all animals were assigned a place in the universe according to the Chinese concept of nature. From the very early yin/yang cosmology to later developments of Daoist and Confucian philosophies and ethics, Chinese animals gained new meanings related to their historical contexts. This book explores these new findings, using the colorful animal images and their rich and evolving symbolic meanings to gain insight into unique aspects of Chinese art, as well as Chinese culture and history. Exhibition Schedule: Cincinnati Museum of Art (October 2009 - February 2010)

This is a beautifully illustrated book and a lively, entertaining, illuminating discussion of the contribution and effects of East Asian art on American culture. Warren Cohen portrays the assembling of the great American collections of East Asian art, public and private, and the idiosyncrasies of the collectors. Particular attention is focused on how this art became part of the cultural consciousness of the people of the United States, transforming their culture into something more complex than the Western civilization their ancestors brought from Europe. Cohen tells of art collectors, dealers, and historians, of museums and their curators, of art and imperialism, art and politics, art as an instrument of foreign policy. One of America's leading diplomatic historians, Cohen views art as an important part of international relations. He describes the use of art in "cultural diplomacy" to implement policy by China, Japan, and the United States. He argues that "virtually every act in the movement of art between cultures has political implications". The book demonstrates how art collecting interacts with the shifting rhythms of international politics and the business cycle. The recent decline in American economic power, with Japan emerging preeminent, was first obvious in the art world where American collectors found themselves unable to compete with their Japanese and Hong Kong counterparts and watched great works begin to move back across the Pacific.

'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.

The principal aspects of Zen painting and the sumi-e method are explained in this book with a simple and poetic language. The materials used in this method of painting, such as solid ink, stone ink pots, bamboo brushes, and cloth paper, are explained in detail, as are the brushstrokes and techniques specific to each of the four noblemen--the bamboo, the prune, the chrysanthemum, and the wild orchid--with the goal of finding the way to creative expression. Los aspectos principales de la pintura zen y del metodo sumi-e surgen de un lenguaje sencillo y poetico en este libro. Los materiales utilizados como la tinta solida, tinteros de piedra, pinceles de bambu y papeles de fibras se describen detalladamente en esta guia, la cual tambien ensena las diferentes pinceladas y tecnicas particulares de los cuatro honorables caballeros: el bambu, el ciruelo, el crisantemo y la orquidea silvestre, con la noble finalidad de encontrar un camino para expresar la creatividad.

In The Other American Moderns, ShiPu Wang analyzes the works of four early twentieth-century American artists who engaged with the concept of “Americanness”: Frank Matsura, Eitarō Ishigaki, Hideo Noda, and Miki Hayakawa. In so doing, he recasts notions of minority artists’ contributions to modernism and American culture. Wang presents comparative studies of these four artists’ figurative works that feature Native Americans, African Americans, and other racial and ethnic minorities, including Matsura and Susan Timento Pose at Studio (ca. 1912), The Bonus March (1932), Scottsboro Boys (1933), and Portrait of a Negro (ca. 1926). Rather than creating art that reflected “Asian aesthetics,” Matsura, Ishigaki, Noda, and Hayakawa deployed “imagery of the Other by the Other” as their means of exploring, understanding, and contesting conditions of diaspora and notions of what it meant to be American in an age of anti-immigrant sentiment and legislation. Based on a decade-long excavation of previously unexamined collections in the United States and Japan, The Other American Moderns is more than a rediscovery of “forgotten” minority artists: it reconceives American modernism by illuminating these artists’ active role in the shaping of a multicultural and cosmopolitan culture. This nuanced analysis of their deliberate engagement with the ideological complexities of American identity contributes a new vision to our understanding of non-European identity in modernism and American art.

The fifth in a five volume series. Volume V deals with small collections of ivories found at Fort Shalmaneser and tries to place them in their positions before the final assault and looting on the palace.

"Plunder and pleasure" is the first book of its kind to provide an in-depth study of the role played by dealers and collectors of art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the Western craze for East Asian art was at its peak. The book comprises an overview of Japonisme and the translation into English of two important French texts detailing the trade in Asian art at this time: "Notes d'un Bibeloteur au Japon" by the art dealer Philippe Sichel (1839/40-99) and "Souvenirs d'un vieil Amateur d'Art de l'Extreme-Orient" by the collector Raymond Koechlin (1860-1931). Both translations are extensively annotated. A discussion of the content and significance of the translations as well as short biographical sketches of Sichel and Koechlin are also included. "Plunder and Pleasure" casts new light on the subject of Western tastes for East Asian art during this period and furthers our understanding of the cultural relations between the Far East and the West that were going on at this time.

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.