This richly illustrated book examines the changing significance of ruins as vehicles for cultural memory in Chinese art and visual culture from ancient times to the present. The story of ruins in China is different from but connected to ‘ruin culture’ in the West. This book explores indigenous Chinese concepts of ruins and their visual manifestations, as well as the complex historical interactions between China and the West since the eighteenth century.Wu Hung leads us through an a...

This book tells two stories about the full-length mirror. One story, through time and space, crisscrosses the globe to introduce a broad range of historical actors: kings and slaves, artists and writers, merchants and craftsmen, courtesans and commoners. The other story explores the connections between object, painting and photography, the full-length mirror providing a new perspective on historical artefacts and their images in art and visual culture.The Full-Length Mirror...

Constructed over a millennium from the fourth to fourteenth centuries CE near Dunhuang, an ancient border town along the Silk Road in northwest China, the Mogao Caves comprise the largest, most continuously created, and best-preserved treasure trove of Buddhist art in the world. Previous overviews of the art of Dunhuang have traced the caves' unilinear history. This book examines the caves from the perspective of space, treating them as physical and historical sites that can be ap...

No other civilization in the pre-modern world was more obsessed with creating underground burial structures than the Chinese. For at least five thousand years, from the fourth millennium BCE to the early twentieth century, Chinese people devoted an extraordinary amount of wealth and labour to building tombs and furnishing them with exquisite objects and images.In art history these ancient burial sites have mainly been appreciated 'as treasure troves' of exciting and often previously...

From the first sets of photographic records made by Western travellers to the emergence of ‘Chinese photography’ imbued with national anxiety and individual desire, and from doctored portraits of Chairman Mao to ‘experimental’ representations of urban transformation and avant-garde performances of the post-Cultural Revolution era, the development of photography in China has followed divergent paths through changing sociopolitical contexts, producing images with different agendas, technologi...

This book contemplates a large problem: what is a traditional Chinese painting? Wu Hung answers this question through a comprehensive analysis of the screen, a major format and a popular pictorial motif in traditional China. With a broad array of examples ranging from the early centuries C.E. to the 1800s, he explores the screen’s position in art – as an important site for artistic imagination, as an illusionary representation on a flat surface, and as an architectural device defining cult...

A sweeping look at Chinese art across the millennia that upends traditional perspectives and offers new pathways for art historyThroughout Chinese history, dynastic time—the organization of history through the lens of successive dynasties—has been the dominant mode of narrating the story of Chinese art, even though there has been little examination of this concept in discourse and practice until now. Chinese Art and Dynastic Time uncovers how the developme...

A Panoramic View of Chinese Culture is an accessible introduction to the beautiful, vibrant world of Chinese customs, history, and civilization. Written for English speakers, with simplified Chinese translations of key words, the text invites students of China and the Chinese language to engage with the text in new and interesting ways. Covering everything from history, philosophy, and religion, to sports, cuisine, and medicine, A Panoramic View of Chinese Culture covers ...

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...

The Search for a Vanishing Beijing weaves the genres of travel essays and travel guides into a comprehensive narrative about the cultural mosaic of the capital of China. The author leads the reader through palaces, temples, back streets and markets while bringing back to living memory forgotten or overlooked Peking customs, stories and beliefs. The text touches on everything under the sun as the reader walks from Tian An Men Square through the surrounding neighborhoods and further to sight...

For more than three thousand years, Chinese life – from the city and the imperial palace, to the temple, the market and the family home – was configured around the courtyard. So too were the accomplishments of China's artistic, philosophical and institutional classes. Confucius' Courtyard tells the story of how the courtyard – that most singular and persistent architectural form – holds the key to understanding, even today, much of Chinese society and culture.Part architec...

A single volume history of China, offering a look into the past of the global superpower and its significance today.Michael Wood has travelled the length and breadth of China, the world's oldest civilization and longest lasting state, to tell a thrilling story of intense drama, fabulous creativity, and deep humanity that stretches back thousands of years.After a century and a half of foreign invasion, civil war, and revolution, China has once again returned t...