Download or read book The Art History of the Ming Dynasty written by Li Shi and published by DeepLogic. This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is the volume of “The Art History of the Ming Dynasty” among a series of books of “Deep into China Histories”. The earliest known written records of the history of China date from as early as 1250 BC, from the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1046 BC) and the Bamboo Annals (296 BC) describe a Xia dynasty (c. 2070–1600 BC) before the Shang, but no writing is known from the period The Shang ruled in the Yellow River valley, which is commonly held to be the cradle of Chinese civilization. However, Neolithic civilizations originated at various cultural centers along both the Yellow River and Yangtze River. These Yellow River and Yangtze civilizations arose millennia before the Shang. With thousands of years of continuous history, China is one of the world's oldest civilizations, and is regarded as one of the cradles of civilization.The Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BC) supplanted the Shang and introduced the concept of the Mandate of Heaven to justify their rule. The central Zhou government began to weaken due to external and internal pressures in the 8th century BC, and the country eventually splintered into smaller states during the Spring and Autumn period. These states became independent and warred with one another in the following Warring States period. Much of traditional Chinese culture, literature and philosophy first developed during those troubled times.In 221 BC Qin Shi Huang conquered the various warring states and created for himself the title of Huangdi or "emperor" of the Qin, marking the beginning of imperial China. However, the oppressive government fell soon after his death, and was supplanted by the longer-lived Han dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD). Successive dynasties developed bureaucratic systems that enabled the emperor to control vast territories directly. In the 21 centuries from 206 BC until AD 1912, routine administrative tasks were handled by a special elite of scholar-officials. Young men, well-versed in calligraphy, history, literature, and philosophy, were carefully selected through difficult government examinations. China's last dynasty was the Qing (1644–1912), which was replaced by the Republic of China in 1912, and in the mainland by the People's Republic of China in 1949.Chinese history has alternated between periods of political unity and peace, and periods of war and failed statehood – the most recent being the Chinese Civil War (1927–1949). China was occasionally dominated by steppe peoples, most of whom were eventually assimilated into the Han Chinese culture and population. Between eras of multiple kingdoms and warlordism, Chinese dynasties have ruled parts or all of China; in some eras control stretched as far as Xinjiang and Tibet, as at present. Traditional culture, and influences from other parts of Asia and the Western world (carried by waves of immigration, cultural assimilation, expansion, and foreign contact), form the basis of the modern culture of China.
Download or read book A General History of Chinese Art written by Xifan Li and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-10-03 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume analyses the history of Chinese art during the time of the Ming Dynasty during which the various traditions of painting academies were developed further leading to new painting styles and schools. The volume also highlights the developments in music, crafts, porcelain, and architecture. A General History of Chinese Art comprises six volumes with a total of nine parts spanning from the Prehistoric Era until the 3rd year of Xuantong during the Qing Dynasty (1911). The work provides a comprehensive compilation of in-depth studies of the development of art throughout the subsequent reign of Chinese dynasties and explores the emergence of a wide range of artistic categories such as but not limited to music, dance, acrobatics, singing, story telling, painting, calligraphy, sculpture, architecture, and crafts. Unlike previous reference books, A General History of Chinese Art offers a broader overview of the notion of Chinese art by asserting a more diverse and less material understanding of arts, as has often been the case in Western scholarship.
Download or read book Empire of Great Brightness written by Craig Clunas and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empire of Great Brightnessis an innovative and accessible history of a high point in Chinese culture, seen through the riches of its images and objects. Not a simple emperor-by-emperor history, it instead introduces the reader to themes that provide stimulating and original points of entry to the culture of China: to ideas of motion and rest; to the position occupied by writing and objects featuring writing; to ideas about pleasure, about violence and about ageing. It challenges notions of Ming China as a culture closed off from the rest of the world by emphasizing the vibrant interactions between China and the rest of Asia at this period. Craig Clunas uses a wide range of pictures and objects from Ming China to illustrate familiar areas such as painting and ceramics (including the blue-and-white porcelain of the period, arguably the world’s first global ‘brand’). He draws on items from public and private collections from around the world, which will be new even to specialists, including weapons, architecture, textiles and items of dress, printed books (from Ming pornography to the world’s first illustrated reading book for children). He also examines contemporary sources from government edicts to novels and phrasebooks of colloquial Chinese as well as the most recent scholarship to illuminate this most diverse period of Chinese art and culture. Empire of Great Brightnessoffers a varied and stimulating resource for all scholars of China’s cultural history, for historians and art historians of related aspects of the early modern world, and for readers who are intrigued by China’s past.
Download or read book Screen of Kings written by Craig Clunas and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2013-06-15 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Screen of Kings is the first book in any language to examine the cultural role of the regional aristocracy – relatives of the emperors – in Ming dynasty China (1368–1644). Through an analysis of their patronage of architecture, calligraphy, painting and other art forms, and through a study of the contents of their splendid and recently-excavated tombs, this innovative study puts the aristocracy back at the heart of accounts of China’s culture, from which they have been excluded until very recently. Screen of Kings challenges much of the received wisdom about Ming China. Craig Clunas sheds new light on many familiar artworks, as well as work that have never before been reproduced. New archaeological discoveries have furnished the author with evidence of the lavish and spectacular lifestyles of these provincial princes and demonstrate how central the imperial family was to the high culture of the Ming era. Written by the leading specialist in the art and culture of the Ming period, this book will illuminate a key aspect of China’s past, and will significantly alter our understanding of the Ming. It will be enjoyed by anyone with a serious interest in the history and art of this great civilization.
Download or read book Empire of Great Brightness written by Craig Clunas and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History of art / art & design styles.
Download or read book Power and Glory written by He Li and published by Asian Art Museum. This book was released on 2016-02-02 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last native Chinese imperial lineage, the Ming dynasty epitomizes the glories of China's past. Ming means bright, and the term could not be more appropriate, since artwork in many mediums—among them painting, textiles, ceramics, and objects in jades and other stones, gold and other metals, enamel, lacquer, wood, and bamboo—achieved true brilliance during this splendid period. Roughly contemporaneous with the European Renaissance, the Ming dynasty produced comparable artistic achievements, but its depth and diversity have been too seldom explored. This Chinese art book, cataloguing the groundbreaking exhibition at the Asian Art Museum, offers a fresh look at the court arts of the Ming dynasty—featuring exceptional objects from the Palace Museum, Beijing; the Nanjing Municipal Museum; the Shanghai Museum; and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco—many of which have never before been exhibited in the U.S. Power and Glory: Court Arts of China's Ming Dynasty is an essential reference for anyone who wishes to comprehend the historical development and enduring richness of Chinese court arts of the era.
Download or read book Power and Glory written by He Li and published by Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. This book was released on 2008 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ming vases have been long regarded as the epitome of priceless beauty. Exploring the grandeur of the last native Chinese dynasty (1368-1644), 'Power and Glory' demonstrates why not just vases but Ming art of many types has earned such acclaim.
Download or read book Art in China written by Craig Clunas and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1997 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China can boast a history of art lasting 5,000 years and embracing a huge diversity of images and objects - jade tablets, painted silk handscrolls and fans, ink and lacquer painting, porcelain-ware, sculptures, and calligraphy. They range in scale from the vast 'terracotta army' with its 7,000or so life-size figures, to the exquisitely delicate writing of fourth-century masters such as Wang Xizhin and his teacher, 'Lady Wei'. But this rich tradition has not, until now, been fully appreciated in the West where scholars have focused their attention on sculpture, downplaying art more highlyprized by the Chinese themselves such as calligraphy. Art in China marks a breakthrough in the study of the subject. Drawing on recent innovative scholarship and on newly-accessible studies in China itself Craig Clunas surveys the full spectrum of the visual arts in China. He ranges from the Neolithic period to the art scene of the 1980s and 1990s,examining art in a variety of contexts as it has been designed for tombs, commissioned by rulers, displayed in temples, created for the men and women of the educated ilite, and bought and sold in the marketplace. Many of the objects illustrated in this book have previously been known only to a fewspecialists, and will be totally new to a general audience.
Download or read book Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China written by Craig Clunas and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2006-03-01 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China is not simply a survey of sixteenth-century images, but rather, a thorough and thoughtful examination of visual culture in China's Ming Dynasty, one that considers images wherever they appeared—not only paintings, but also illustrated books, maps, ceramic bowls, lacquered boxes, painted fans, and even clothing and tomb pictures. Clunas's theory of visuality incorporates not only the image and the object upon which it is placed but also the culture which produced and purchased it. Economic changes in sixteenth-century China—the rapid expansion of trade routes and a growing class of consumers—are thus intricately bound up with the evolution of the image itself. Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China will be a touchstone for students of Chinese history, art, and culture.
Download or read book The Arts of China 900 1620 written by William Watson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This beautiful book is the second in a major three-volume series that will survey China's immense wealth of art, architecture, and artefacts from prehistoric times to the twentieth century. It covers the most prolific and broad-ranging period of Chinese art history, from the Song Dynasty with its spectacular landscape paintings to the Ming Dynasty with its lovely pottery. William Watson considers architecture, painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts in equal balance. He follows styles and motifs as they are developed in each medium from one province to another and discusses materials and techniques as well as the iconography and function of every art form. He also explores relationships between one medium and another, tracing, for example, the influence of Buddhist iconography on sculptural traditions and on the architecture of temples and towers and showing how ceramic ornament affected the development of ornament in other media.
Download or read book The Art Book of Chinese Paintings written by Ming Deng and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to a millennium's worth of Chinese paintings features 400 classical works by more than 240 artists that represent their different historical periods, in a volume that offers insight into how Chinese art uniquely reflects cultural perspectives and the natural world.
Download or read book The Arts of China written by Michael Sullivan and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1984-01-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: this book presents a fascinating and balanced picture of Chinese art from the Stone Age to the present day. The author concerns himself not only with art, but also with Chinese philosophy, religion, and the realm of ideas.
Download or read book Culture Courtiers and Competition written by David M. Robinson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This collection of essays reveals the Ming court as an arena of competition and negotiation, where a large cast of actors pursued individual and corporate ends, personal agency shaped protocol and style, and diverse people, goods, and tastes converged. Rather than observing an immutable set of traditions, court culture underwent frequent reinterpretation and rearticulation, processes driven by immediate personal imperatives, mediated through social, political, and cultural interaction.The essays address several common themes. First, they rethink previous notions of imperial isolation, instead stressing the court’s myriad ties both to local Beijing society and to the empire as a whole. Second, the court was far from monolithic or static. Palace women, monks, craftsmen, educators, moralists, warriors, eunuchs, foreign envoys, and others strove to advance their interests and forge advantageous relations with the emperor and one another. Finally, these case studies illustrate the importance of individual agency. The founder’s legacy may have formed the warp of court practices and tastes, but the weft varied considerably. Reflecting the complexity of the court, the essays represent a variety of perspectives and disciplines—from intellectual, cultural, military, and political to art history and musicology."
Download or read book What the Emperor Built written by Aurelia Campbell and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most famous rulers in Chinese history, the Yongle emperor (r. 1402–24) gained renown for constructing Beijing’s magnificent Forbidden City, directing ambitious naval expeditions, and creating the world’s largest encyclopedia. What the Emperor Built is the first book-length study devoted to the architectural projects of a single Chinese emperor. Focusing on the imperial palaces in Beijing, a Daoist architectural complex on Mount Wudang, and a Buddhist temple on the Sino-Tibetan frontier, Aurelia Campbell demonstrates how the siting, design, and use of Yongle’s palaces and temples helped cement his authority and legitimize his usurpation of power. Campbell offers insight into Yongle’s sense of empire—from the far-flung locations in which he built, to the distant regions from which he extracted construction materials, and to the use of tens of thousands of craftsmen and other laborers. Through his constructions, Yongle connected himself to the divine, interacted with his subjects, and extended imperial influence across space and time. Spanning issues of architectural design and construction technologies, this deft analysis reveals remarkable advancements in timber-frame construction and implements an art-historical approach to examine patronage, audience, and reception, situating the buildings within their larger historical and religious contexts.
Download or read book Fruitful Sites written by Craig Clunas and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gardens are sites that can be at one and the same time admired works of art and valuable pieces of real estate. As the first account in English to be wholly based on contemporary Chinese sources, this beautifully illustrated book grounds the practices of garden-making in Ming Dynasty China (1369–1644) firmly in the social and cultural history of the day. Who owned gardens? Who visited them? How were they represented in words, in paintings and in visual culture generally, and what meanings did these representations hold at different levels of Chinese society? Drawing on a wide range of recent work in cultural theory, Craig Clunas provides for the first time a historical and materialist account of Chinese garden culture, and replaces broad generalizations and orientalist fantasy with a convincing picture of the garden's role in social life.
Download or read book The Arts of China written by Michael Sullivan and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preface to Sixth Edition -- Afterthoughts -- Chronological Table of Dynasties and Modern Republics -- Reign Periods of the Ming and Qing Dynasties -- Before the Dawn of History -- The Early Bronze Age: Shang and Western Zhou -- Eastern Zhou and the Period of the Warring States -- The Qin and Han Dynasties -- The Three Kingdoms and the Six Dynasties -- The Sui and Tang Dynasties -- The Five Dynasties and the Song Dynasty -- The Yuan Dynasty -- The Ming Dynasty -- The Qing Dynasty -- The Twentieth Century and Beyond.
Download or read book Art by the Book written by J. P. Park and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2017-05-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sometime before 1579, Zhou Lujing, a professional writer living in a bustling commercial town in southeastern China, published a series of lavishly illustrated books, which constituted the first multigenre painting manuals in Chinese history. Their popularity was immediate and their contents and format were widely reprinted and disseminated in a number of contemporary publications. Focusing on Zhou's work, Art by the Book describes how such publications accommodated the cultural taste and demands of the general public, and shows how painting manuals functioned as a form in which everything from icons of popular culture to graphic or literary cliche was presented to both gratify and shape the sensibilities of a growing reading public. As a special commodity of early modern China, when cultural standing was measured by a person's command of literati taste and lore, painting manuals provided nonelite readers with a device for enhancing social capital.