Whether chanted as devotional prayers, intoned against the dangers of the wilds, or invoked to heal the sick and bring ease to the dead, incantations were pervasive features of Buddhist practice in late medieval China (600–1000 C.E.). Material incantations, in forms such as spell-inscribed amulets and stone pillars, were also central to the spiritual lives of both monks and laypeople. In centering its analysis on the Chinese material culture of these deeply embodied forms of Buddhist ritua...

Written with reader accessibility in mind, this comprehensive handbook of symbolism in Chinese art and culture will be an invaluable resource for any student of Eastern art history, Chinese arts and crafts, and anyone interested in commonly held Chinese beliefs and their origins.In Chinese Symbolism & Art Motifs Fourth Edition, scholar C.A.S. Williams offers concise explanations of the essential symbols and motifs relevant to Chinese literature, arts & cra...

A journalist travels throughout mainland China and Taiwan in search of his family’s hidden treasure and comes to understand his ancestry as he never has before.In 1938, when the Japanese arrived in Huan Hsu’s great-great-grandfather Liu’s Yangtze River hometown of Xingang, Liu was forced to bury his valuables, including a vast collection of prized antique porcelain, and undertake a decades-long trek that would splinter the family over thousands of miles. Many years...

Without a doubt, Katsushika Hokusai is the most famous Japanese artist since the middle of the nineteenth century whose art is known to the Western world. Reflecting the artistic expression of an isolated civilisation, the works of Hokusai - one of the first Japanese artists to emerge in Europe - greatly influenced the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters, such as Vincent van Gogh. Considered during his life as a living Ukiyo-e master, Hokusai fascinates us with the variety and th...

Zen master Julian Daizan Skinner guides the reader through a sequence of meditation techniques that can safely lead even a complete novice through to advanced levels. Based on his own long experience of the Rinzai Zen tradition, as taught by the great seventeenth-century masters, Hakuin and Bankei, Daizan highlights the key points for success and addresses the pitfalls. Structured around a traditional teaching framework called "The two wings of a bird," Daizan clearly lays-out how these me...

This richly illustrated book explores the contested history of art and nationalism in the tumultuous last decades of British rule in India. Western avant-garde art inspired a powerful weapon of resistance among India’s artists in their struggle against colonial repression, and it is this complex interplay of Western modernism and Indian nationalism that is the core of this book.The Triumph of Modernism takes the surprisingly unremarked Bauhaus exhibition in Calcutta in 192...

In the Forbidden City and other palaces around Beijing, Emperor Qianlong (r. 1736-1795) surrounded himself with monumental paintings of architecture, gardens, people, and faraway places. The best artists of the imperial painting academy, including a number of European missionary painters, used Western perspectival illusionism to transform walls and ceilings with visually striking images that were also deeply meaningful to Qianlong. These unprecedented works not only offer new insights into...

Terracotta Warriors provides an intriguing, original and up-to-date account of one of the wonders of the ancient world. Illustrated with a wealth of original photographs, this is the first book available for the general reader. In one of the most astounding archaeological discoveries of all time, the Terracotta Warriors were discovered by chance by farmers in 1974. We now understand that the excavated pits containing nearly eight thousand warriors and hundreds of horses are only p...

Koichi Shinohara traces the evolution of Esoteric Buddhist rituals from the simple recitation of spells in the fifth century to complex systems involving image worship, mandala initiation, and visualization practices in the ninth century. He presents an important new reading of a seventh-century Chinese text called the Collected Dharani Sutras, which shows how earlier rituals for specific deities were synthesized into a general Esoteric initiation ceremony and how, for the first t...

In October 1860, at the culmination of the Second Opium War, British and French troops looted and destroyed one of the most important palace complexes in imperial China—the Yuanmingyuan. Known in the West as the "Summer Palace," this site consisted of thousands of buildings housing a vast art collection. It is estimated that over a million objects may have been taken from the palaces in the Yuanmingyuan—and many of these are now scattered around the world, in private collections and public...

Place plays a fundamental role in the structuring of the discipline of Art History. And yet, place also limits the questions art historians can ask and impairs analysis of objects and locations in the interstices of established, ossified categories. The chapters in this interdisciplinary volume investigate place in all of its dynamism and complexity: several call into question traditional constructions regarding place in Art History, while others explore the fundamental role that place pla...

In the 5th century, the Champa kingdom held sway over a large area of today’s Vietnam. Several magnificent structures still testify to their former presence in the Nha Trang region. Cham sculpture was worked in a variety of materials, principally sandstone, but also gold, silver and bronze. It was primarily used to illustrate themes from Indian mythology. The kingdom was gradually eroded during the 15th century by the inexorable descent of the people towards the south (“Nam Tiên”) from the...