Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.1215/00666637-9953454
Rob Linrothe
abstract:Michelle Wang’s Maṇḍalas in the Making is a groundbreaking treatment of mainly ninth-and tenth-century wall murals at Dunhuang making use of recent scholarship on early Esoteric Buddhist texts, teachers, and themes in Chinese and Tibetan sources. The review article assesses and extends the understanding and definitions of forms of mandala in India and China, recognizing the distinction between textual accounts of internal, visualized mandalas (bhāvyamaṇḍala), and the external, physical objects (lekhyamaṇḍala). Questions concerning the role(s) of the viewer and the purpose(s) of the Dunhuang shrines for the patrons and designers are also raised. For the patrons and designers, the shrines surely provided opportunities for acts of merit-making and expressions of gratitude for good fortune. For viewers and later visitors, were the shrines coded expressions of discursive Buddhist “meaning” and “repentance rituals,” as Wang mainly argues, or (perhaps also) locales for gestalt experience of the presence of consecrated deities? The attribution of the visual style to a Nepalese-derived Tibetan mode is also examined.
文摘：王的马ṇḍalas in the Making是对敦煌九世纪和十世纪壁画的开创性处理，利用了最近关于早期密教文本、教师以及中国和西藏来源主题的研究。这篇综述文章评估并扩展了印度和中国对曼陀罗形式的理解和定义，认识到内部、可视化曼陀罗的文本描述之间的区别（bhāvyamaṇḍala），以及外部的实物（lekhyamaṇḍala）。还提出了有关观者的角色和敦煌神殿对赞助人和设计者的目的的问题。对于赞助人和设计师来说，这些神殿无疑为他们提供了立功和表达对好运的感激之情的机会。对于观众和后来的游客来说，这些神殿是王主要认为的佛教“意义”和“忏悔仪式”的编码表达，还是（也许也是）神圣神灵存在的格式塔体验的场所？视觉风格归属于尼泊尔衍生的西藏模式也进行了研究。
{"title":"“Structure and Subject Matter” at Dunhuang","authors":"Rob Linrothe","doi":"10.1215/00666637-9953454","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00666637-9953454","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Michelle Wang’s Maṇḍalas in the Making is a groundbreaking treatment of mainly ninth-and tenth-century wall murals at Dunhuang making use of recent scholarship on early Esoteric Buddhist texts, teachers, and themes in Chinese and Tibetan sources. The review article assesses and extends the understanding and definitions of forms of mandala in India and China, recognizing the distinction between textual accounts of internal, visualized mandalas (bhāvyamaṇḍala), and the external, physical objects (lekhyamaṇḍala). Questions concerning the role(s) of the viewer and the purpose(s) of the Dunhuang shrines for the patrons and designers are also raised. For the patrons and designers, the shrines surely provided opportunities for acts of merit-making and expressions of gratitude for good fortune. For viewers and later visitors, were the shrines coded expressions of discursive Buddhist “meaning” and “repentance rituals,” as Wang mainly argues, or (perhaps also) locales for gestalt experience of the presence of consecrated deities? The attribution of the visual style to a Nepalese-derived Tibetan mode is also examined.","PeriodicalId":41400,"journal":{"name":"ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART","volume":"72 1","pages":"255 - 272"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44704771","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.1215/00666637-9953432
J. P. Park
In 1634 Zhang Taijie (b. 1588) published a woodblock edition of Baohuilu (A Record of Treasured Paintings), an extensive catalog of a massive painting collection he claimed to have built. This work would seem to be a useful resource for historians of Chinese art since it provides accounts of paintings by artists whose works are no longer extant. But there is one major problem: the book is a forgery. What is more, Zhang also forged paintings to match the documentation he created, so he could also profit from trading in them. Interestingly, the book also echoes unfounded claims registered in art-historical writings of the time, wherein leading critics and connoisseurs, including Dong Qichang (1555–1636), propounded completely contrived arguments by which they tried to establish legitimate lineages in Chinese art. Such propositions represent, borrowing from Eric Hobsbawm's insight, a kind of “invented tradition,” a fictional history of practice and artifact that runs as some thought it ought to have, rather than as it did. By looking into all the three major components of forgeries in early modern China that are referenced throughout Zhang Taijie's catalog—(1) fabricated texts, (2) forged paintings, and (3) fake histories/theories—this paper aims to explain how Baohuilu facilitated Zhang's candid desire for fame and profit in the booming art market of the time, while unveiling certain cultural, social, and genealogical anxieties and tensions negotiated in the form of art-historical theories.
{"title":"Art-Historical Fiction or Fictional Art History?","authors":"J. P. Park","doi":"10.1215/00666637-9953432","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00666637-9953432","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In 1634 Zhang Taijie (b. 1588) published a woodblock edition of Baohuilu (A Record of Treasured Paintings), an extensive catalog of a massive painting collection he claimed to have built. This work would seem to be a useful resource for historians of Chinese art since it provides accounts of paintings by artists whose works are no longer extant. But there is one major problem: the book is a forgery. What is more, Zhang also forged paintings to match the documentation he created, so he could also profit from trading in them. Interestingly, the book also echoes unfounded claims registered in art-historical writings of the time, wherein leading critics and connoisseurs, including Dong Qichang (1555–1636), propounded completely contrived arguments by which they tried to establish legitimate lineages in Chinese art. Such propositions represent, borrowing from Eric Hobsbawm's insight, a kind of “invented tradition,” a fictional history of practice and artifact that runs as some thought it ought to have, rather than as it did. By looking into all the three major components of forgeries in early modern China that are referenced throughout Zhang Taijie's catalog—(1) fabricated texts, (2) forged paintings, and (3) fake histories/theories—this paper aims to explain how Baohuilu facilitated Zhang's candid desire for fame and profit in the booming art market of the time, while unveiling certain cultural, social, and genealogical anxieties and tensions negotiated in the form of art-historical theories.","PeriodicalId":41400,"journal":{"name":"ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41923492","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00666637-9577707
P. Sturman
After decades of being hidden from public view, the recent emergence of Su Shi's (1037–1101) Old Tree, Rock, and Bamboo has led to a long overdue reexamination of this famous scroll that many scholars regard as the single credible extant painting by the artist. Questions concerning authenticity have been at the forefront, and this has led to a focus on the scroll's impressive documentation, which begins with two poetic inscriptions contemporary to Su Shi, including one by the famed calligrapher Mi Fu (1052–1107). Yet, while scrutiny of the painting and its documentation has made a strong case for authenticity, it has largely avoided two seals on the painting that claim the actual authorial presence of Su and Mi. It is argued in this article that those two seals, which some have attributed to the later collector Yang Zun (ca. 1320–after 1368), should in fact belong to Su Shi and Mi Fu. Acknowledging their true provenance consequently provides an extraordinary entrée to reconstructing the dates and circumstances of both the painting and Mi's poetic inscription. Beyond this, we gain a glimpse of how the literati creatively employed inscriptional practices to enhance the communicative function of painting and calligraphy in the late eleventh century.
{"title":"Inscriptional Practices of the Song Literati","authors":"P. Sturman","doi":"10.1215/00666637-9577707","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00666637-9577707","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 After decades of being hidden from public view, the recent emergence of Su Shi's (1037–1101) Old Tree, Rock, and Bamboo has led to a long overdue reexamination of this famous scroll that many scholars regard as the single credible extant painting by the artist. Questions concerning authenticity have been at the forefront, and this has led to a focus on the scroll's impressive documentation, which begins with two poetic inscriptions contemporary to Su Shi, including one by the famed calligrapher Mi Fu (1052–1107). Yet, while scrutiny of the painting and its documentation has made a strong case for authenticity, it has largely avoided two seals on the painting that claim the actual authorial presence of Su and Mi. It is argued in this article that those two seals, which some have attributed to the later collector Yang Zun (ca. 1320–after 1368), should in fact belong to Su Shi and Mi Fu. Acknowledging their true provenance consequently provides an extraordinary entrée to reconstructing the dates and circumstances of both the painting and Mi's poetic inscription. Beyond this, we gain a glimpse of how the literati creatively employed inscriptional practices to enhance the communicative function of painting and calligraphy in the late eleventh century.","PeriodicalId":41400,"journal":{"name":"ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44847120","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00666637-9577718
Y. Kyo
After the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, the Empress Dowager Cixi, the de facto head of the Qing court, undertook projects to reconstitute her identity through the production of photographs and paintings. While they helped to reestablish and strengthen her ties with foreign nations, the paintings and photographs also enabled Cixi to contemplate the fluidity of identity and, subsequently, challenge the authority of colonial narratives. Variations of similar poses and the use of mirrors in highly staged photographs reveal the Empress Dowager's sly civility and mimicry of colonial photographic conventions to subvert the imperial gaze. Combining a reclamation of female authors' voices, including those of Katherine Carl, Sarah Pike Conger, Yu Derling, and Yu Rongling, with close visual analyses of select photographs placed within particular political, historical, and religious contexts, reveals the ways in which the Empress Dowager used photography not only as a space to negotiate political agency, but also as a subversive means to challenge the entire colonial apparatus of knowledge production that hinged so critically on the belief in photography's veracity and authenticity.
{"title":"Between Concealment and Revelation","authors":"Y. Kyo","doi":"10.1215/00666637-9577718","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00666637-9577718","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 After the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, the Empress Dowager Cixi, the de facto head of the Qing court, undertook projects to reconstitute her identity through the production of photographs and paintings. While they helped to reestablish and strengthen her ties with foreign nations, the paintings and photographs also enabled Cixi to contemplate the fluidity of identity and, subsequently, challenge the authority of colonial narratives. Variations of similar poses and the use of mirrors in highly staged photographs reveal the Empress Dowager's sly civility and mimicry of colonial photographic conventions to subvert the imperial gaze. Combining a reclamation of female authors' voices, including those of Katherine Carl, Sarah Pike Conger, Yu Derling, and Yu Rongling, with close visual analyses of select photographs placed within particular political, historical, and religious contexts, reveals the ways in which the Empress Dowager used photography not only as a space to negotiate political agency, but also as a subversive means to challenge the entire colonial apparatus of knowledge production that hinged so critically on the belief in photography's veracity and authenticity.","PeriodicalId":41400,"journal":{"name":"ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45147615","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00666637-9577685
Allison R. Miller
Scholars of Greek and Roman art have long recognized that many sculptures that today appear unpainted were originally covered in bright, polychrome paint. In contrast, the hallowed works of China's classical antiquity, the bronzes, are generally believed to have been monochrome works. In recent years, however, many varieties of bronzes have been unearthed with polychrome ornamentation including sacrificial vessels, figural sculptures, mirrors, lamps, weapons, and personal ornaments. This article summarizes and interprets the current evidence for painting on early Chinese bronze artifacts based on recent archaeological discoveries and on newer advances in technical analysis. In particular, I show that the practice of applying paint to bronzes goes far beyond embedding pigment into the intaglio channels of bronzes such as occurred during the Shang and Western Zhou eras. I also demonstrate that especially in the Warring States and early imperial periods, painted coloration on bronzes took off in diversely rich and compelling ways. This article highlights the various modes and techniques of painting bronze in early China, and offers several hypotheses as to why such polychrome ornamentation was desirable in early China, reconciling those motives with our quite different modern sensibilities.
{"title":"Painting Bronze in Early China","authors":"Allison R. Miller","doi":"10.1215/00666637-9577685","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00666637-9577685","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Scholars of Greek and Roman art have long recognized that many sculptures that today appear unpainted were originally covered in bright, polychrome paint. In contrast, the hallowed works of China's classical antiquity, the bronzes, are generally believed to have been monochrome works. In recent years, however, many varieties of bronzes have been unearthed with polychrome ornamentation including sacrificial vessels, figural sculptures, mirrors, lamps, weapons, and personal ornaments. This article summarizes and interprets the current evidence for painting on early Chinese bronze artifacts based on recent archaeological discoveries and on newer advances in technical analysis. In particular, I show that the practice of applying paint to bronzes goes far beyond embedding pigment into the intaglio channels of bronzes such as occurred during the Shang and Western Zhou eras. I also demonstrate that especially in the Warring States and early imperial periods, painted coloration on bronzes took off in diversely rich and compelling ways. This article highlights the various modes and techniques of painting bronze in early China, and offers several hypotheses as to why such polychrome ornamentation was desirable in early China, reconciling those motives with our quite different modern sensibilities.","PeriodicalId":41400,"journal":{"name":"ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46866829","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00666637-9577696
D. Srinivasan
Mathura's Hindu art opens with two deities performing a gesture I have named “the self-coronation gesture”; it has no antecedents in Indian art or texts. Śiva and the Warrior Goddess (possibly developing into Mahisāsuramardinī) bestow upon themselves an honorific crowning object, the floral garland. Wherefrom came this particular gesture? The paper assigns the gesture's origin to the Greek Olympian. From this source a progression is traced eastward, to ancient Bactria, then Gandhāra, finally to Mathura during the Kushan Age. The progression reveals an evolutionary iconographic process going from Western heroes, especially Heracles, to Eastern heroes, especially Vīras, from solid crowns to pliant wreaths, from one hand to two arms needed to make the gesture. The meaning also evolves: the gesture no longer has the Olympian connotation but continues to suggest a sublime triumph. Reading the way my original nomenclature had been applied by others, the paper comments on their feasibility, especially a problematic Kushan/post-Kushan interpretation of Mahisāsuramardinī executing the gesture. Iconographic gaps remain. Needed is further input from the Northwest on the gesture, the source of the Warrior Goddess, and the degree of intermingling between local, Northern cults with early Hinduism.
{"title":"Self-Coronation","authors":"D. Srinivasan","doi":"10.1215/00666637-9577696","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00666637-9577696","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Mathura's Hindu art opens with two deities performing a gesture I have named “the self-coronation gesture”; it has no antecedents in Indian art or texts. Śiva and the Warrior Goddess (possibly developing into Mahisāsuramardinī) bestow upon themselves an honorific crowning object, the floral garland. Wherefrom came this particular gesture? The paper assigns the gesture's origin to the Greek Olympian. From this source a progression is traced eastward, to ancient Bactria, then Gandhāra, finally to Mathura during the Kushan Age. The progression reveals an evolutionary iconographic process going from Western heroes, especially Heracles, to Eastern heroes, especially Vīras, from solid crowns to pliant wreaths, from one hand to two arms needed to make the gesture. The meaning also evolves: the gesture no longer has the Olympian connotation but continues to suggest a sublime triumph. Reading the way my original nomenclature had been applied by others, the paper comments on their feasibility, especially a problematic Kushan/post-Kushan interpretation of Mahisāsuramardinī executing the gesture. Iconographic gaps remain. Needed is further input from the Northwest on the gesture, the source of the Warrior Goddess, and the degree of intermingling between local, Northern cults with early Hinduism.","PeriodicalId":41400,"journal":{"name":"ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43778915","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1215/00666637-9302528
Sarah Richardson
How can visual texts, closed books, and painted images work together in Buddhist temples to reinforce one another and act upon viewers? The fourteenth-century murals at the Tibetan temple of Shalu integrate pictures with long passages of Tibetan texts and select inscriptions that explain the powers of seeing paintings. The murals combine and mix media—books, paintings, cloth—into expressive wholes that ultimately argue that walls are in fact much more than walls. The paintings find ways to make the temple's book collections more accessible. Here we find a public art effort that weaves together a compelling argument for why religious texts and religious art both “work” for and on their audiences. Shalu was a grandly expanded temple showing off its resources and its connections in a broader cosmopolitan sphere of production and exchange. Its walls were designed to weave media together, finding ways to celebrate and explain larger and newer corporate productions (book projects, larger monasteries). An intentional play of materiality (clay, cloth, book) emphasized by the inscriptions and performed in the pictorial compositions assists in the imaginative act of directly seeing deities, while also playing with the awareness that acts of imagination entail the play of just-like/seeing-as. Since neither clay nor cloth nor word on their own are adequate vessels for representing an enlightened being, here they collaborate with each other and with viewers in the imaginative act, promising that the deity, like the teachings, can be directly experienced.
{"title":"When Walls Could Talk","authors":"Sarah Richardson","doi":"10.1215/00666637-9302528","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00666637-9302528","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 How can visual texts, closed books, and painted images work together in Buddhist temples to reinforce one another and act upon viewers? The fourteenth-century murals at the Tibetan temple of Shalu integrate pictures with long passages of Tibetan texts and select inscriptions that explain the powers of seeing paintings. The murals combine and mix media—books, paintings, cloth—into expressive wholes that ultimately argue that walls are in fact much more than walls. The paintings find ways to make the temple's book collections more accessible. Here we find a public art effort that weaves together a compelling argument for why religious texts and religious art both “work” for and on their audiences. Shalu was a grandly expanded temple showing off its resources and its connections in a broader cosmopolitan sphere of production and exchange. Its walls were designed to weave media together, finding ways to celebrate and explain larger and newer corporate productions (book projects, larger monasteries). An intentional play of materiality (clay, cloth, book) emphasized by the inscriptions and performed in the pictorial compositions assists in the imaginative act of directly seeing deities, while also playing with the awareness that acts of imagination entail the play of just-like/seeing-as. Since neither clay nor cloth nor word on their own are adequate vessels for representing an enlightened being, here they collaborate with each other and with viewers in the imaginative act, promising that the deity, like the teachings, can be directly experienced.","PeriodicalId":41400,"journal":{"name":"ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42197081","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1215/00666637-9302484
K. Tsiang
abstract:This study reexamines images and textual materials that can be related to the dating and iconography of caves at Yungang and Longmen and the historical transition between them. The transition is associated with the move of the Northern Wei capital from Pingcheng to Luoyang, and the beginnings of the Longmen caves is widely believed to coincide with the establishment of the capital at Luoyang in 495. Inscriptions in the Guyang Cave have been interpreted to support the widely held belief that it was created at the time of the move of the capital. Visual evidence of sculptural practice and transitions in sculptural art that can be observed broadly between caves and cave site can also be seen in micro-environments within a single cave or a single niche that offer new insights. Through comparative analysis of the caves' images and artworks found in other contexts, and their consideration in conjunction with textual materials, the author proposes a revisionist reconstruction of the early work in the Guyang Cave.
{"title":"A Revisionist Reading of the Transition of Buddhist Cave-Making from Yungang to Longmen","authors":"K. Tsiang","doi":"10.1215/00666637-9302484","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00666637-9302484","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This study reexamines images and textual materials that can be related to the dating and iconography of caves at Yungang and Longmen and the historical transition between them. The transition is associated with the move of the Northern Wei capital from Pingcheng to Luoyang, and the beginnings of the Longmen caves is widely believed to coincide with the establishment of the capital at Luoyang in 495. Inscriptions in the Guyang Cave have been interpreted to support the widely held belief that it was created at the time of the move of the capital. Visual evidence of sculptural practice and transitions in sculptural art that can be observed broadly between caves and cave site can also be seen in micro-environments within a single cave or a single niche that offer new insights. Through comparative analysis of the caves' images and artworks found in other contexts, and their consideration in conjunction with textual materials, the author proposes a revisionist reconstruction of the early work in the Guyang Cave.","PeriodicalId":41400,"journal":{"name":"ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART","volume":"71 1","pages":"131 - 170"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42169844","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1215/00666637-9302506
Created around 1915, Chen Shizeng's Beijing Fengsu album represents a pictorial experiment that led to his subsequent well-known theoretical recasting of Chinese literati painting as a progressive and universally comprehensible visual language. Through an examination of the stylistic and technical innovations of the paintings, the essay demonstrates that the album's function as a visual record of Beijing folk customs is in part a historical byproduct of a then urgent attempt to establish the pictorial expression of a new subjectivity by a leading member of China's last generation of literati. Through the aid of drawing from direct observation, emulation of visual effects from Western-style drawing using Chinese ink and pigments, incorporation of antiquarian motifs, and unconventional compositional schemes, the album managed to reinvent vernacular painting (fengsu hua) and establish the popular pictorial genre manhua in modern China.
{"title":"Vernacular Painting and Transitional Beijing","authors":"","doi":"10.1215/00666637-9302506","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00666637-9302506","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Created around 1915, Chen Shizeng's Beijing Fengsu album represents a pictorial experiment that led to his subsequent well-known theoretical recasting of Chinese literati painting as a progressive and universally comprehensible visual language. Through an examination of the stylistic and technical innovations of the paintings, the essay demonstrates that the album's function as a visual record of Beijing folk customs is in part a historical byproduct of a then urgent attempt to establish the pictorial expression of a new subjectivity by a leading member of China's last generation of literati. Through the aid of drawing from direct observation, emulation of visual effects from Western-style drawing using Chinese ink and pigments, incorporation of antiquarian motifs, and unconventional compositional schemes, the album managed to reinvent vernacular painting (fengsu hua) and establish the popular pictorial genre manhua in modern China.","PeriodicalId":41400,"journal":{"name":"ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43303055","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1215/00666637-9302517
Nachiket Chanchani
abstract:The focus of this essay is a spectacular scroll in the British Museum's collections that has been neither exhibited nor published since its acquisition. Perhaps that is because several fundamental questions about it remain unanswered: Where and when was it made? Who made it, and for whom? What purpose and meaning did it have for the first people who saw it and those who subsequently came into contact with it? In this essay, I begin to address these elementary questions. I establish that this eleven-foot-long scroll was created in Mewar in western India in 1769, and that since then it has cleaved many realms. Those realms include art and devotion, text and textile, astral science and genealogy, classical epics and vernacular histories, and cyclical time and linear time. I then postulate that understanding this short scroll's ability to nimbly separate and join those realms can help us critically appreciate the forms, layouts, and functions of two other contemporaneous cloth scrolls from the same region that are considerably longer and also have received sparse scholarly attention. Ultimately, I show how micro studies of scrolls and scrolling practices can allow us to understand forms of knowledge in Mewar on the eve of British colonialism, and to participate in challenging certain perceptions of the region's past that remain inflected by James Tod's writings nearly two hundred years after their publication.
{"title":"The Time Machines of Eighteenth-Century Mewar","authors":"Nachiket Chanchani","doi":"10.1215/00666637-9302517","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00666637-9302517","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:The focus of this essay is a spectacular scroll in the British Museum's collections that has been neither exhibited nor published since its acquisition. Perhaps that is because several fundamental questions about it remain unanswered: Where and when was it made? Who made it, and for whom? What purpose and meaning did it have for the first people who saw it and those who subsequently came into contact with it? In this essay, I begin to address these elementary questions. I establish that this eleven-foot-long scroll was created in Mewar in western India in 1769, and that since then it has cleaved many realms. Those realms include art and devotion, text and textile, astral science and genealogy, classical epics and vernacular histories, and cyclical time and linear time. I then postulate that understanding this short scroll's ability to nimbly separate and join those realms can help us critically appreciate the forms, layouts, and functions of two other contemporaneous cloth scrolls from the same region that are considerably longer and also have received sparse scholarly attention. Ultimately, I show how micro studies of scrolls and scrolling practices can allow us to understand forms of knowledge in Mewar on the eve of British colonialism, and to participate in challenging certain perceptions of the region's past that remain inflected by James Tod's writings nearly two hundred years after their publication.","PeriodicalId":41400,"journal":{"name":"ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART","volume":"71 1","pages":"219 - 241"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45381754","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：