A leading female sculptor and figure in Chinese contemporary art, Yin Xiuzhen (b. 1963, Beijing, China) began her career in the early 1990s following her graduation from Capital Normal University in Beijing where she received a B.A. from the Fine Arts Department in 1989. Best known for her works that incorporate second-hand objects, Yin uses her artwork to explore modern issues of globalization and homogenization. By utilizing recycled materials such as sculptural documents of memory, she seeks to personalize objects and allude to the lives of specific individuals, which are often neglected in the drive toward excessive urbanization, rapid modern development and the growing global economy. The artist explains, "In a rapidly changing China, 'memory' seems to vanish more quickly than everything else. That's why preserving memory has become an alternative way of life."

This richly illustrated book examines the changing significance of ruins as vehicles for cultural memory in Chinese art and visual culture from ancient times to the present. Leading scholar of Chinese art Wu Hung shows how the story of ruins in China is different from but connected to "ruin culture" in the West. He investigates indigenous Chinese concepts of ruins and their visual manifestations, as well as the complex historical interactions between China and the West since the eighteenth century.

Analyzing a broad variety of traditional and contemporary visual materials, including painting, architecture, photography, prints, and cinema, Wu also embraces a wide variety of subjects--from indigenous methods of recording damage and decay in ancient China, to realistic images of architectural ruins in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the strong interest in urban ruins in contemporary China, as shown in the many artworks that depict demolished houses and decaying industrial sites. The result is an original interpretation of the development of Chinese art, as well as a unique contribution to global art history.

From Neolithic painted petroglyphs, early paintings on silk, and landscapes by twelfth-century literati to the traditional handscrolls being produced today, Chinese painting has always had the power to enthrall. This magnificent book, written by a team of eminent international scholars, is the first to recount the history of Chinese painting over a span of some three thousand years. Drawing on museum collections, archives, and archaeological sites in China-including many resources never before available to Western scholars-as well as on collections in other countries, the authors present and analyze the very best examples of Chinese painting: more than 300 of them are reproduced here in color. Both accessible to the general reader and revelatory for the scholar, the book provides the most up-to-date and detailed history of China's pictorial art available today. In this book the authors rewrite the history of Chinese art wherever it is found-in caves, temples, or museum collections. They begin by grounding the Western reader in Chinese traditions and practices, showing in essence how to look at a Chinese painting. They then shed light on such topics as the development of classical and narrative painting, the origins of the literati tradition, the flowering of landscape painting, and the ways the traditions of Chinese painting have been carried into the present day. The book, which concludes with a glossary of techniques and terms and a list of artists by dynasty, is an essential resource for all lovers of, or newcomers to, Chinese painting. Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting is the inaugural volume in a new series, The Culture & Civilization of China, a joint publishing venture of Yale University Press and the American Council of Learned Societies with the China International Publishing Group in Beijing. The undertaking will ultimately result in the publication of more than seventy-five volumes on the visual arts, classical literature, language, and philosophy, as well as several comprehensive reference volumes. Published in association with Foreign Languages Press, Beijing

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 labour 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.