A sweeping look at Chinese art across the millennia that upends traditional perspectives and offers new pathways for art history Throughout 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 development of Chinese art was described in its original cultural, sociopolitical, and artistic contexts, and how these narratives were interwoven with contemporaneous artistic creation. In doing so, leading art historian Wu Hung opens up new pathways for the consideration of not only Chinese art, but also the whole of art history. Wu Hung brings together ten case studies, ranging from the third millennium BCE to the early twentieth century CE, and spanning ritual and religious art, painting, sculpture, the built environment, and popular art in order to examine the deep-rooted patterns in the historical conceptualization of Chinese art. Elucidating the changing notions of dynastic time in various contexts, he also challenges the preoccupation with this concept as the default mode in art historical writing. This critical investigation of dynastic time thus constitutes an essential foundation to pursue new narrative and interpretative frameworks in thinking about art history. Remarkable for the sweep and scope of its arguments and lucid style, Chinese Art and Dynastic Time probes the roots of the collective imagination in Chinese art and frees us from long-held perspectives on how this art should be understood. Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
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 array of traditional and contemporary visual materials, including painting, architecture, photography, prints, and cinema. A Story of Ruins shows how ruins are integral to traditional Chinese culture in both architecture and pictorial forms. It traces the changes in their representation over time, from indigenous methods of recording damage and decay in ancient China, to realistic images of architectural ruins in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the strong interest in urban ruins in contemporary China, as shown in the many artworks that depict demolished houses and decaying industrial sites. The result is an original interpretation of the development of Chinese art, as well as a unique contribution to global art history.
Hing Hing Ming reviews some of the major episodes of the Han Dynasty, from its founding by Liu Bang to the Lü Clan Disturbance and subsequent diplomatic overtures and military campaigns against the minor Chinese kingdoms, the Mongols, and Gojoseon (the ancient Korean Kingdom).
In the first exploration of Chinese paintings as both material products and pictorial representations, The Double Screen shows how the collaboration and tension between material form and image gives life to a painting. A Chinese painting is often reduced to the image it bears; its material form is dismissed; its intimate connection with social activities and cultural conventions neglected. A screen occupies a space and divides it, supplies an ideal surface for painting, and has been a favorite pictorial image in Chinese art since antiquity. Wu Hung undertakes a comprehensive analysis of the screen, which can be an object, an art medium, a pictorial motif, or all three at once. With its diverse roles, the screen has provided Chinese painters with endless opportunities to reinvent their art. The Double Screen provides a powerful non-Western perspective on issues from portraiture and pictorial narrative to voyeurism, masquerade, and political rhetoric. It will be invaluable to anyone interested in the history of art and Asian studies.
Tiananmen Square is the most sacred space in Beijing - a site for Mao's monumental portrait, for museums, parades and, more recently, for violent demonstrations. Wu Hung grew up in Beijing and witnessed its transformation. In this lavishly illustrated work he offers a vivid, often personal, account of the struggle over Beijing's reinvention and offers new insights into the city's history. The final part of the book is devoted to paintings, photographs and performances by artists that take issue with the political and cultural meanings of Tiananmen Square and official efforts of repression."--BOOK JACKET.
The funerary shrine of the Confucian scholar Wu Liang, created in AD 151, is the most important surviving pre-Buddhist monument in China. That is to say, it is the most important single work of visual art from the centuries that set the patterns of Chinese thought for almost two millennia. The importance of the shrine lies in the beauty of the stone reliefs on its walls and, especially, in the remarkably comprehensive iconography of its nearly one hundred scenes. They constitute, in effect, a coherent symbolic structure of the universe as the Han Chinese conceived it. This structure consists of three sections: the ceiling carvings present the Mandate of Heaven; the scenes on the two gables depict the paradise of the immortals; and the 44 stories related on the walls illustrate the history of mankind, starting with the creators of human culture and ending with a portrait of Wu Liang, who designed his own memorial. The author finds the shrine comparable, in the comprehensiveness and cultural significance of its iconography, to the cathedral at Chartres or the Sistine Chapel.
Beautifully illustrated, a stirring and wide-ranging reflection on art, technology, culture—and the full-length mirror. 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 among objects, painting, and photography, the full-length mirror providing a new perspective on historical artifacts and their images in art and visual culture. The Full-Length Mirror represents a new kind of global art history in which “global” is understood in terms of both geography and visual medium, a history encompassing Europe, Asia, and North America, and spanning over two millennia from the fourth century BCE to the early twentieth century.
Invaluable resource for anyone who wants to understand contemporary Chinese art, one of the most fascinating art scenes of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
We might think the Egyptians were the masters of building tombs, but no other civilization has devoted more time and resources to underground burial structures than the Chinese. For at least five thousand years, from the fourth millennium B.C.E. to the early twentieth century, the Chinese have been building some of the world’s most elaborate tombs and furnishing them with exquisite objects. It is these objects and the concept of the tomb as a “treasure-trove” that The Art of the Yellow Springs seeks to critique, drawing on recent scholarship to examine memorial sites the way they were meant to be experienced: not as a mere store of individual works, but as a work of art itself. Wu Hung bolsters some of the new trends in Chinese art history that have been challenging the conventional ways of studying funerary art. Examining the interpretative methods themselves that guide the study of memorials, he argues that in order to understand Chinese tombs, one must not necessarily forget the individual works present in them—as the beautiful color plates here will prove—but consider them along with a host of other art-historical concepts. These include notions of visuality, viewership, space, analysis, function, and context. The result is a ground-breaking new assessment that demonstrates the amazing richness of one of the longest-running traditions in the whole of art history.
Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century is a groundbreaking and timely exhibition organized by The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Chicago. Guest curator Wu Hung, a leading expert on ancient and contemporary Chinese art, identified three critical aspects of current artistic production in China and tightly focused the exhibition to explore those themes—"Demystification," "Ruins," and "Transience." With its concentration on individual artists through close readings of specific works, Transience constitutes a new voice in the current discussion about contemporary Chinese art and its place in post-national cultural understanding.
From the first sets of photographic records made by Western travelers to doctored portraits of Chairman Mao and the avant-garde photographic performances of the post–Cultural Revolution era, photography in China has followed divergent paths. In this book, Wu Hung explores the multiple histories of photographic production in China, using them to tell a larger story about China’s shifting sociopolitical contexts and the different agendas, technologies, and aesthetics that have helped define its arts. At the center of the book is a large question: how has photography represented China and its people, its collective history and memory as well as the diversity of Chinese artists who have striven for creative expression? To address this question, the author offers an in-depth study of selected photographers, themes, and movements in Chinese photography from 1860 to the present, covering a wide range of genres, including portraiture, photojournalism, architectural and landscape photography, and conceptual photography. Beautifully illustrated, this book offers a multifaceted and in-depth analysis of an important photographic history.
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 approached, entered, and understood sensually. It prioritizes the actual experiences of the people of the past who built and used the caves. Five spatial contexts provide rich material for analysis: Dunhuang as a multicultural historic place; the Mogao Cave complex as an evolving entity; the interior space of caves; interaction of the visual program with architectural space; and pictorial space within wall paintings that draws viewers into an otherworldly time. With its novel approach to this repository of religious art, Spatial Dunhuang will be a must-read for anyone interested in Buddhist art and for visitors to Dunhuang.
Catalog of the exhibition Summoning Ghosts: the Art of Hung Liu, organized by Rene de Guzman on behalf of the Oakland Museum of California and presented March 16-June 30, 2013.
For more than three decades, the celebrated photographer Wang Wusheng has been captivated by the magnificence of Mount Huangshan, also known as the Yellow Mountains. As shown in this lavishly produced volume featuring a collection of 122 stunning images, largely in duotone, here are mist-shrouded, granite peaks emerging from an ever-changing veil of clouds, sculptural craggy rocks, cool springs on lofty cliffs, and weathered, oddly-shaped pine trees, depicted in all seasons. Wang Wusheng's images are so exceptional that they look like paintings. Accompanying the photographs are two essays about the art history and natural history of the Yellow Mountains."--BOOK JACKET.
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