Kategoria BISAC: Art >> Asian - General

In a critical reassessment of chinoiserie, a style both praised and derided for its triviality, prettiness, and ornamental excesses, Stacey Sloboda shows that it was no mute participant in eighteenth-century global consumer culture, but was instead a critical commentator on that culture. Analysing ceramics, wallpaper, furniture, garden architecture and other significant examples of British and Chinese design, this book takes an object-focused approach to studying the cultural phenomenon of the 'Chinese taste' in eighteenth-century Britain.

Demonstrating that the ornamental...

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,...

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...

This volume tells the story of the early collectors who contributed to the Raffles Museum, Singapore, one of the oldest ethnographic museums in Southeast Asia. It examines the motivations of these 19th and early 20th-century naturalists, explorers, business, and missionaries.

A catalogue of the Hickey Collection, Singapore, which was donated to the Asian Civilisations Museum. Blanc de Chine became one of the most popular varieties of porcelain at home and abroad. This volume tells the history of the production and its reception, while showcasing one of the finest collections of this celebrated ware.

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...

The first major monograph on Zhang Xiaogang (b. 1958), a leading Chinese contemporary artist, world‐renowned for his haunting, surrealist works. Both a retrospective of his paintings and a biography of his dramatic life, Zhang Xiaogang: Disquieting Memories is a key resource for academia and art enthusiasts alike. This book features all of the artist s iconic series major works as well as lesser‐known drawings and never‐before‐published letters dating from the early 1980s between the artist and his friends. These offer an inside view of everyday life in...

This edited collection explores how graphic art and in particular Japanese manga represent Japanese history.

The articles explore the representation of history in manga from disciplines that include such diverse fields as literary studies, politics, history, cultural studies, linguistics, narratology, and semiotics. Despite this diversity of approaches all academics from these respective fields of study agree that manga pose a peculiarly contemporary appeal that transcends the limitation imposed by traditional approaches to the study and teaching of history. The representation of...

Rhetorical Aesthetics approaches Chinese art and literature from a novel perspective with special interest and influence in Chinese theory since the 1990s. The author works out a practice of reading through fine literary, cinematic, and visual art examples. The monograph focuses on important literary texts from the 1950s onward, analyzes Zhang Yimou's acclaimed early films, and proposes how to understand that much vaunted and maligned of attributes: Chinese creativity. It surveys artistic production in ways that provide direct access to an entirely uncharted universe for those who...