Kategoria BISAC: Art >> Asian - General

In the history of Chinese calligraphy, few are more famous than the eighth-century statesman Yan Zhenqing (709-785). His style is still taught today as a standard, and Chinese bookstores the world over stock inexpensive reproductions of his works for sale as copybooks.

Yet Yan's style cannot be called conventionally attractive. Correct, severe, serious, forceful are terms habitually applied to describe his writing--rarely has his calligraphy been called graceful or beautiful. How, then, did Yan earn such an eminent place in the history of art?

In The Upright Brush, Amy...

This richly illustrated, full-colour volume offers an innovative study of the long, painted scrolls of Northeast Thailand and Laos that depictthe Prince Vessantara Buddhist birth story. A 31-metre scroll in the Asian Civilisations Museum provides the focus for this popular narrative. The scroll is reproduced in its entirety, with comparative illustrations from other scrolls. The authors analyze these scrolls in the context of the Bun Phra Wet - the Thai-Lao and Lao ceremony in which they are used - and consider the complex interplay of text, art, ritual, and belief which occur in these...

Kyoto was Japan's political and cultural capital for more than a millennium before the dawn of the modern era. Until about the fifteenth century, it was also among the world's largest cities and, as the eastern terminus of the Silk Road, it was a place where the political, artistic, and religious currents of Asia coalesced and flourished. Despite these and many other traits that make Kyoto a place of both Japanese and world historical significance, the physical appearance of the premodern city remains largely unknown. Through a synthesis of textual, pictorial, and archeological sources,...

The need to describe the world around us is an impulse as old as the earliest cave wall depictions of running horses and wounded bison. In this descriptive enterprise we have consistently found nature to be a valuable and inspiring companion, and over the centuries, as we moved beyond simple narrative to the complex, exhortative inventions of allegory, nature has reciprocally grown with us, giving us a crucial and familiar framework to help us to know our place in the universe. As a consequence of this evolution, the human imagination can claim innumerable--often epic--accounts built on...

In Milestones on a Golden Road, Richard King presents pivotal works of fiction published under the watchful eye of China's Communist regime between 1945 and 1980. Addressing questions of literary production, King looks at how writers dealt with shifting ideological demands, what indigenous and imported traditions inspired them, and how they were able to depict a utopian Communist future to their readers, even as the present took a very different turn. Early "red classics" were followed by works featuring increasingly lurid images of joyful socialism, and later by fiction exposing...