Download or read book The zoomorphic imagination in Chinese art and culture written by Jerome Silbergeld and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Zoomorphic Imagination in Chinese Art and Culture written by Jerome Silbergeld and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2016-10-31 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China has an age-old zoomorphic tradition. The First Emperor was famously said to have had the heart of a tiger and a wolf. The names of foreign tribes were traditionally written with characters that included animal radicals. In modern times, the communist government frequently referred to Nationalists as “running dogs,” and President Xi Jinping, vowing to quell corruption at all levels, pledged to capture both “the tigers” and “the flies.” Splendidly illustrated with works ranging from Bronze Age vessels to twentieth-century conceptual pieces, this volume is a wide-ranging look at zoomorphic and anthropomorphic imagery in Chinese art. The contributors, leading scholars in Chinese art history and related fields, consider depictions of animals not as simple, one-for-one symbolic equivalents: they pursue in depth, in complexity, and in multiple dimensions the ways that Chinese have used animals from earliest times to the present day to represent and rhetorically stage complex ideas about the world around them, examining what this means about China, past and present. In each chapter, a specific example or theme based on real or mythic creatures is derived from religious, political, or other sources, providing the detailed and learned examination needed to understand the means by which such imagery was embedded in Chinese cultural life. Bronze Age taotie motifs, calendrical animals, zoomorphic modes in Tantric Buddhist art, Song dragons and their painters, animal rebuses, Heaven-sent auspicious horses and foreign-sent tribute giraffes, the fantastic specimens depicted in the Qing Manual of Sea Oddities, the weirdly indeterminate creatures found in the contemporary art of Huang Yong Ping—these and other notable examples reveal Chinese attitudes over time toward the animal realm, explore Chinese psychology and patterns of imagination, and explain some of the critical means and motives of Chinese visual culture. The Zoomorphic Imagination in Chinese Art and Culture will find a ready audience among East Asian art and visual culture specialists and those with an interest in literary or visual rhetoric. Contributors: Sarah Allan, Qianshen Bai, Susan Bush, Daniel Greenberg, Carmelita (Carma) Hinton, Judy Chungwa Ho, Kristina Kleutghen, Kathlyn Liscomb, Jennifer Purtle, Jerome Silbergeld, Henrik Sørensen, and Eugene Y. Wang.
Download or read book China and the West written by Elisa Ambrosio and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-11-21 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Mirroring China s Past written by Tao Wang and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-27 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lavishly illustrated book that offers an in-depth look at the cultural practices surrounding the tradition of collecting ancient bronzes in China during the 18th and 19th centuries In ancient China (2000–221 b.c.) elaborate bronze vessels were used for rituals involving cooking, drinking, and serving food. This fascinating book not only examines the cultural practices surrounding these objects in their original context, but it also provides the first in-depth study tracing the tradition of collecting these bronzes in China. Essays by international experts delve into the concerns of the specialized culture that developed around the vessels and the significant influence this culture, with its emphasis on the concept of antiquity, had on broader Chinese society. While focusing especially on bronze collections of the 18th and 19th centuries, this wide-ranging catalogue also touches on the ways in which contemporary artists continue to respond to the complex legacy of these objects. Packed with stunning photographs of exquisitely crafted vessels, Mirroring China’s Past is an enlightening investigation into how the role of ancient bronzes has evolved throughout Chinese history.
Download or read book Mouse vs Cat in Chinese Literature written by and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2019-03-18 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In literatures worldwide, animal fables have been analyzed for their revealingly anthropomorphic views, but until now little attention has been given to the animal tales of China. The complex, competitive relationship between rodents (vilified as thieves of grain) and the felines with whom they are perennially at war is explored in this presentation of Chinese tales about cats and mice. Master translator Wilt Idema situates them in an overview of animal tales in world literature, in the Chinese literary tradition as a whole, and within Chinese imaginative depictions of animals. The tales demonstrate the animals’ symbolism and their unusually prominent—and verbal—role in the stories. These readings depict cats and mice in conflict, in marital bonds, and in litigation—most centrally in a legal case of a mouse against a cat in the underworld court of King Yama. Many of the stories adopt the perspective of the mice as animals merely trying to survive, while also recognizing that cats are natural hunters. This entertaining volume will appeal to readers interested in Chinese literature and society, comparative literature, and posthumanist consideration of human-animal relations.
Download or read book Metamorphic Imagery in Ancient Chinese Art and Religion written by Elizabeth Childs-Johnson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-05-30 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metamorphic Imagery in Ancient Chinese Art and Religion demonstrates that the concept of metamorphism was central to ancient Chinese religious belief and practices from at least the late Neolithic period through the Warring States Period of the Zhou dynasty. Central to the authors' argument is the ubiquitous motif in early Chinese figurative art, the metamorphic power mask. While the motif underwent stylistic variation over time, its formal properties remained stable, underscoring the image’s ongoing religious centrality. It symbolized the metamorphosis, through the phenomenon of death, of royal personages from living humans to deceased ancestors who required worship and sacrificial offerings. Treated with deference and respect, the royal ancestors lent support to their living descendants, ratifying and upholding their rule; neglected, they became dangerous, even malevolent. Employing a multidisciplinary approach that integrates archaeologically recovered objects with literary evidence from oracle bone and bronze inscriptions to canonical texts, all situated in the appropriate historical context, the study presents detailed analyses of form and style, and of change over time, observing the importance of relationality and the dynamic between imagery, materials, and affects. This book is a significant publication in the field of early China studies, presenting an integrated conception of ancient art and religion that surpasses any other work now available.
Download or read book Xuanhe Catalogue of Paintings written by Amy McNair and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-31 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Xuanhe Catalogue of Paintings is the first complete translation of the well-known document produced at the court of Emperor Huizong (r. 1100–1125). Dated to 1120, the Catalogue is divided into ten categories of subject matter. Under Daoist and Buddhist Subjects, Figural Subjects, Architecture, Barbarian Tribes, Dragons and Fish, Landscape, Domestic and Wild Animals, Flowers and Birds, Ink Bamboo, and Vegetables and Fruit are biographies of 231 painters, ranging from famous early masters, such as Wu Daozi (ca. 685-758) and Li Cheng (919-967), to otherwise unknown artists of the Song-dynasty court, including fourteen eunuch officials and sixteen male and female members of the royal family. Titles of their pictures held in the palace collection are listed for each artist. These 6,396 paintings testify to the visual culture experienced by viewers of the twelfth century. The author's Introduction analyzes the Catalogue as a source of evidence about the formation of the Song-dynasty palace collection and argues that the majority of its pictures were already in the collection before Huizong's reign, as a result of conquest, confiscation, tribute, gift culture, collecting by earlier emperors, and the production of academy artists and regular officials at the Song court. Under Huizong's reign, around a thousand other pictures were added to the Catalogue through acquisition and reattribution. Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Download or read book Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea written by Petya Andreeva and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-05 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Numerous Iron-Age nomadic alliances flourished along the 5000-mile Eurasian steppe route. From Crimea to the Mongolian grassland, nomadic image-making was rooted in metonymically conveyed zoomorphic designs, creating an alternative ecological reality. The nomadic elite nucleus embraced this elaborate image system to construct collective memory in reluctant, diverse political alliances organised around shared geopolitical goals rather than ethnic ties. Largely known by the term "e;animal style"e;, this zoomorphic visual rhetoric became so ubiquitous across the Eurasian steppe network that it transcended border regions and reached the heartland of sedentary empires like China and Persia. This book shows how a shared fluency in animal-style design became a status-defining symbol and a bonding agent in opportunistic nomadic alliances, and was later adopted by their sedentary neighbours to showcase worldliness and control over the "e;Other"e;. In this study of enormous geographical scope, the author raises broader questions about the place of nomadic societies in the art-historical canon.
Download or read book Ichthyology in Context 1500 1880 written by Paul J. Smith and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-12-28 with total page 777 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ichthyology in Context (1500–1880) provides a broad spectre of early modern manifestations of human fascination with fish – “fish” understood in the early modern sense of the term, as aquatilia: all aquatic animals, including sea mammals and crustaceans. It addresses the period’s quickly growing knowledge about fish in its multiple, varied and rapidly changing interaction with culture. This topic is approached from various disciplines: history of science, cultural history, history of collections, historical ecology, art history, literary studies, and lexicology. Attention is given to the problematic questions of visual and textual representation of fish, and pre- and post-Linnean classification and taxonomy. This book also explores the transnational exchange of ichthyological knowledge and items in and outside Europe. Contributors: Cristina Brito, Tobias Bulang, João Paulo S. Cabral, Florike Egmond, Dorothee Fischer, Holger Funk, Dirk Geirnaert, Philippe Glardon, Justin R. Hanisch, Bernardo Jerosch Herold, Rob Lenders, Alan Moss, Doreen Mueller, Johannes Müller, Martien J.P. van Oijen, Pietro Daniel Omodeo, Anne M. Overduin-de Vries, Theodore W. Pietsch, Cynthia Pyle, Marlise Rijks, Paul J. Smith, Ronny Spaans, Robbert Striekwold, Melinda Susanto, Didi van Trijp, Sabina Tsapaeva, and Ching-Ling Wang.
Download or read book Animals Through Chinese History written by Roel Sterckx and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative collection opens a door into the rich history of animals in China. This title is also available as Open Access.
Download or read book A Couple of Soles written by Li Yu and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Couple of Soles is a classic comedic romance by the seventeenth-century playwright Li Yu. Tan Chuyu, a poor young scholar, falls in love with the beautiful actress Liu Miaogu. He joins her family’s acting troupe, and, in plays within the play, romance ensues. After Liu’s family attempts to marry her off to a local country squire, she performs a famous scene in which a heroine drowns herself—and then jumps off the stage into a river, followed by Tan. The local river deity rescues the lovers from death by transforming them into a pair of soles. Li balances their romance with the adventures of a retired upright official involving banditry, bribery, and mistaken identity—and who nets and shelters the two fish when they regain human form. Written at a time when China was beginning to recover from the cataclysmic Ming-Qing dynastic transition, A Couple of Soles displays Li’s biting wit as well as his reflections on the concerns of his age, including the dangers of administrative service and the role of theater in society. The play combines witty wordplay and caustic satire with a strong emphasis on traditional moral values. The first major comedy from late imperial China to appear in English translation, A Couple of Soles provides an unparalleled view of the theater in seventeenth-century China. A general introduction and a detailed appendix shed further light on the play and its context.
Download or read book The King s Harvest written by Brian Lander and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A multidisciplinary environmental history of early China’s political systems, featuring newly available Chinese archaeological data This book is a multidisciplinary study of the ecology of China’s early political systems up to the fall of the first empire in 207 BCE. Brian Lander traces the formation of lowland North China’s agricultural systems and the transformation of its plains from diverse forestland and steppes to farmland. He argues that the growth of states in ancient China, and elsewhere, was based on their ability to exploit the labor and resources of those who harnessed photosynthetic energy from domesticated plants and animals. Focusing on the state of Qin, Lander amalgamates abundant new scientific, archaeological, and excavated documentary sources to argue that the human domination of the central Yellow River region, and the rest of the planet, was made possible by the development of complex political structures that managed and expanded agroecosystems.
Download or read book Experiences in Painting T u hua Chien w n Chih written by Ruoxu Guo and published by . This book was released on 1951 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Temples in the Cliffside written by Sonya S. Lee and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At sixty-two meters the Leshan Buddha in southwest China is the world’s tallest premodern statue. Carved out of a riverside cliff in the eighth century, it has evolved from a religious center to a UNESCO World Heritage Site and popular tourist destination. But this Buddha does not stand alone: Sichuan is home to many cave temples with such monumental sculptures, part of a centuries-long tradition of art-making intricately tied to how local inhabitants made use of their natural resources with purpose and creativity. These examples of art embedded in nature have altered landscapes and have influenced the behaviors, values, and worldviews of users through multiple cycles of revival, restoration, and recreation. As hybrid spaces that are at once natural and artificial, they embody the interaction of art and the environment over a long period of time. This far-ranging study of cave temples in Sichuan shows that they are part of the world’s sustainable future, as their continued presence is a reminder of the urgency to preserve culture as part of today’s response to climate change. Temples in the Cliffside brings art history into close dialogue with current discourse on environmental issues and contributes to a new understanding of the ecological impact of artistic monuments.
Download or read book Bone Bronze and Bamboo written by Constance A. Cook and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2024-09-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bone, Bronze, and Bamboo explores the tremendous wealth of newly unearthed artifacts and manuscripts that have been revolutionizing the study of early China. Leading scholars from China and abroad lend their expertise in archaeology, art history, paleography, intellectual history, and many other disciplines to show how these fascinating finds change our understanding of China's past. Organized in a chronological progression from the Shang to Han periods, and treating bone, bronze, and bamboo-strip artifacts in turn, the book treats a wide breadth of topics, from the status of owls in Shang religion to the Zhou court's economic interest in managing salt resources, and from the conceptual evolution of de 德 in Spring and Autumn covenants to the interplay between materiality and text in Han scribal primers. Bone, Bronze, and Bamboo exemplifies the exciting energy and sense of discovery inspired by these sources in recent years, while surveying the latest debates and developments shaping early China as a field.
Download or read book Picturing the True Form written by Shih-shan Susan Huang and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Picturing the True Form investigates the long-neglected visual culture of Daoism, China’s primary indigenous religion, from the tenth through thirteenth centuries with references to both earlier and later times. In this richly illustrated book, Shih-shan Susan Huang provides a comprehensive mapping of Daoist images in various media, including Dunhuang manuscripts, funerary artifacts, and paintings, as well as other charts, illustrations, and talismans preserved in the fifteenth-century Daoist Canon. True form (zhenxing), the key concept behind Daoist visuality, is not static, but entails an active journey of seeing underlying and secret phenomena.This book’s structure mirrors the two-part Daoist journey from inner to outer. Part I focuses on inner images associated with meditation and visualization practices for self-cultivation and longevity. Part II investigates the visual and material dimensions of Daoist ritual. Interwoven through these discussions is the idea that the inner and outer mirror each other and the boundary demarcating the two is fluid. Huang also reveals three central modes of Daoist symbolism—aniconic, immaterial, and ephemeral—and shows how Daoist image-making goes beyond the traditional dichotomy of text and image to incorporate writings in image design. It is these particular features that distinguish Daoist visual culture from its Buddhist counterpart."
Download or read book The Golden Road written by Haoran and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
