Read Books Online and Download eBooks, EPub, PDF, Mobi, Kindle, Text Full Free.
Visual And Material Cultures In Middle Period China
Download Visual And Material Cultures In Middle Period China full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online Visual And Material Cultures In Middle Period China ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
Book Synopsis Visual and Material Cultures in Middle Period China by : Patricia Buckley Ebrey
Download or read book Visual and Material Cultures in Middle Period China written by Patricia Buckley Ebrey and published by Sinica Leidensia. This book was released on 2017 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eight studies examine key features of Chinese visual and material cultures, ranging from tombs and ceramics to Buddhist paintings and colophons on calligraphies. The essays connect visual materials to funeral and religious practices, drama, poetry, literati life, travel, and trade.
Book Synopsis Visual and Material Cultures in Middle Period China by :
Download or read book Visual and Material Cultures in Middle Period China written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-07-20 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eight studies examine key features of Chinese visual and material cultures, ranging from tomb design, metalware, ceramic pillows, and bronze mirrors, to printed illustrations, calligraphic rubbings, colophons, and paintings on Buddhist, landscape, and narrative themes. Questions addressed include how artists and artisans made their works, the ways both popular literature and market forces could shape ways of looking, and how practices and imagery spread across regions. The authors connect visual materials to funeral and religious practices, drama, poetry, literati life, travel, and trade, showing ways visual images and practices reflected, adapted to, and reproduced the culture and society around them. Readers will gain a stronger appreciation of the richness of the visual and material cultures of Middle Period China.
Book Synopsis The Mongol Century by : Shane McCausland
Download or read book The Mongol Century written by Shane McCausland and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2015-02-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mongol Century explores the visual world of China's Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), the spectacular but relatively short-lived regime founded by Khubilai Khan, regarded as the pre-eminent khanate of the Mongol empire. This book illuminates the Yuan era – full of conflicts and complex interactions between Mongol power and Chinese heritage – by delving into the visual history of its culture, considering how Mongol governance and values imposed a new order on China's culture and how a sedentary, agrarian China posed specific challenges to the Mongols' militarist and nomadic lifestyle. Shane McCausland explores how an unusual range of expectations and pressures were placed on Yuan culture: the idea that visual culture could create cohesion across a diverse yet hierarchical society, while balancing Mongol desires for novelty and display with Chinese concerns about posterity. Although in recent years exhibitions have begun to open up the inherent paradoxes of Yuan culture, this is the first book in English to adopt a comprehensive approach. It incorporates a broad range of visual media of the East Asia region to reconsider the impact Mongol culture had in China, from urban architecture and design to tomb murals and porcelain, and from calligraphy and printed paper money to stone sculpture. Fresh and invigorating, The Mongol Century explores, in fascinating detail, the visual culture of this brief but captivating era of East Asian history.
Download or read book China written by Deborah A. Bekken and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-02-01 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the entrance of The Field Museum’s Cyrus Tang Hall of China, two Chinese stone guardian lions stand tall, gazing down intently at approaching visitors. One lion’s paw rests upon a decorated ball symbolizing power, while the other lion cradles a cub. Traditionally believed to possess attributes of strength and protection, statues such as these once stood guard outside imperial buildings, temples, and wealthy homes in China. Now, centuries later, they guard this incredible permanent exhibition. China’s long history is one of the richest and most complex in the known world, and the Cyrus Tang Hall of China offers visitors a wonderful, comprehensive survey of it through some 350 artifacts on display, spanning from the Paleolithic period to present day. Now, with China: Visions through the Ages, anyone can experience the marvels of this exhibition through the book’s beautifully designed and detailed pages. Readers will gain deeper insight into The Field Museum’s important East Asian collections, the exhibition development process, and research on key aspects of China’s fascinating history. This companion book, edited by the exhibition’s own curatorial team, takes readers even deeper into the wonders of the Cyrus Tang Hall of China and enables them to study more closely the objects and themes featured in the show. Mirroring the exhibition’s layout of five galleries, the volume is divided into five sections. The first section focuses on the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods; the second, the Bronze Age, the first dynasties, and early writing; the third, the imperial system and power; the fourth, religion and performance; and the fifth, interregional trade and the Silk Routes. Each section also includes highlights containing brief stories on objects or themes in the hall, such as the famous Lanting Xu rubbing. With chapters from a diverse set of international authors providing greater context and historical background, China: Visions through the Ages is a richly illustrated volume that allows visitors, curious readers, and China scholars alike a chance to have an enduring exchange with the objects featured in the exhibition and with their multifaceted histories.
Book Synopsis Picturing the True Form by : Shih-shan Susan Huang
Download or read book Picturing the True Form written by Shih-shan Susan Huang and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Picturing the True Form investigates the long-neglected visual culture of Daoism, China’s primary indigenous religion, from the tenth through thirteenth centuries with references to both earlier and later times. In this richly illustrated book, Shih-shan Susan Huang provides a comprehensive mapping of Daoist images in various media, including Dunhuang manuscripts, funerary artifacts, and paintings, as well as other charts, illustrations, and talismans preserved in the fifteenth-century Daoist Canon. True form (zhenxing), the key concept behind Daoist visuality, is not static, but entails an active journey of seeing underlying and secret phenomena. This book’s structure mirrors the two-part Daoist journey from inner to outer. Part I focuses on inner images associated with meditation and visualization practices for self-cultivation and longevity. Part II investigates the visual and material dimensions of Daoist ritual. Interwoven through these discussions is the idea that the inner and outer mirror each other and the boundary demarcating the two is fluid. Huang also reveals three central modes of Daoist symbolism—aniconic, immaterial, and ephemeral—and shows how Daoist image-making goes beyond the traditional dichotomy of text and image to incorporate writings in image design. It is these particular features that distinguish Daoist visual culture from its Buddhist counterpart."
Download or read book Towers in the Void written by S. E. Kile and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-30 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The maverick cultural entrepreneur Li Yu survived the tumultuous Ming-Qing dynastic transition of the mid-seventeenth century through a commercially successful practice founded on intermedial experimentation. He engaged an astonishingly broad variety of cultural forms: from theatrical performance and literary production to fashion and wellness; from garden and interior design to the composition of letters and administrative documents. Drawing on his nonliterary work to reshape his writing, he translated this wide-ranging expertise into easily transmittable woodblock-printed form. Towers in the Void is a groundbreaking analysis of Li Yu’s work across these varied fields. It uses the concept of media to traverse them, revealing Li Yu’s creative enterprise as a remaking of early modern media forms. S. E. Kile argues that Li Yu’s cultural experimentation exploits the seams between language and the tangible world. He draws attention to the materiality of particular media forms, expanding the scope of early modern media by interweaving books, buildings, and bodies. Within and across these media, Li Yu’s cultural entrepreneurship with the technology of the printed book embraced its reproducibility while retaining a personal touch. His literary practice informed his garden design and, conversely, he drew on garden design to transform the vernacular short story. Ideas for extreme body modification in Li Yu’s fiction remade the possibilities of real human bodies in his nonfiction writing. Towers in the Void calls for seeing books, bodies, and buildings as interlinked media forms, both in early modern China and in today’s media-saturated world, positioning the Ming and Qing as a crucial site of global early modern cultural change.
Book Synopsis The Rise of West Lake by : Xiaolin Duan
Download or read book The Rise of West Lake written by Xiaolin Duan and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2020-04-30 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lovely West Lake, near scenic Hangzhou on China’s east coast, has been celebrated as a major tourist site since the twelfth century. Now as then, visitors boat to its islands, stroll through its gardens, worship in its temples, and immortalize it in poetry and painting. Hangzhou and West Lake have long served as icons of Chinese landscape appreciation, literary and artistic expression, and tourism. In the first in-depth English-language study of this picturesque locale, Xiaolin Duan examines the interplay between human enterprise and the natural environment during the Song dynasty (960–1279). After the Song lost north China to the Jurchens and the imperial court fled south, a new capital was established at Hangzhou, making the area the national political and cultural center. West Lake became a model for idealized nature, fashioned by the diverse activities of its visitors. Duan shows how engagements in, on, and around West Lake influenced visitors’ conceptualization of nature and sparked the emergence of the lake as a tourist destination, highlighting how the natural landscape played a role in shaping social and cultural constructs. Incorporating evidence from miscellanies, local and temple gazetteers, paintings, maps, poems, and anecdotes, The Rise of West Lake explores the complexity of the lake as an interactive site where ecological and economic concerns contended and where spiritual pursuits overlapped with aesthetic ones.
Book Synopsis The Dynamic Spread of Buddhist Print Culture by : Shih-shan Susan Huang
Download or read book The Dynamic Spread of Buddhist Print Culture written by Shih-shan Susan Huang and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-11-20 with total page 1069 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive study explores the dynamic spread of Buddhist print culture in China and its Asian neighbors. It examines a vast selection of Buddhist printed images and texts, not merely as static cultural relics, but holistically within multicultural contexts related to other cultural products, and as objects on the move, transmitted across a sprawling web of transnational networks, “Buddhist Book Roads”. The author applies interdisciplinary and network approaches developed in art history, religious studies, digital humanities, and the history of the print and book culture to shed new light on Buddhist print culture from visual, textual, social, and religious perspectives.
Book Synopsis Networks of Faith and Profit by : Yiwen Li
Download or read book Networks of Faith and Profit written by Yiwen Li and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-31 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 838 and 1403 CE, there was a six-century lapse in diplomatic relations between present day China and Japan. This hiatus in what is known as the tribute system has led to an assumption that there was little contact between the two countries in this period. Yiwen Li debunks this assumption, arguing instead that a vibrant Sino-Japanese trade network flourished in this period as Buddhist monks and merchants fostered connections across maritime East Asia. Based on a close examination of sources in multiple languages, including poems and letters, transmitted images and objects, and archaeological discoveries, Li presents a vivid and dynamic picture of the East Asian maritime world. She shows how this Buddhist trade network operated outside of the framework of the tribute system and, through novel interpretations of Buddhist records, provides a new understanding of the relationship between Buddhism and commerce.
Book Synopsis A Companion to Korean Art by : J. P. Park
Download or read book A Companion to Korean Art written by J. P. Park and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 677 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The only college-level publication on Korean art history written in English Korean pop culture has become an international phenomenon in the past few years. The popularity of the nation’s exports—movies, K-pop, fashion, television shows, lifestyle and cosmetics products, to name a few—has never been greater in Western society. Despite this heightened interest in contemporary Korean culture, scholarly Western publications on Korean visual arts are scarce and often outdated. A Companion to Korean Art is the first academically-researched anthology on the history of Korean art written in English. This unique anthology brings together essays by renowned scholars from Korea, the US, and Europe, presenting expert insights and exploring the most recent research in the field. Insightful chapters discuss Korean art and visual culture from early historical periods to the present. Subjects include the early paintings of Korea, Buddhist architecture, visual art of the late Chosŏn period, postwar Korean Art, South Korean cinema, and more. Several chapters explore the cultural exchange between the Korean peninsula, the Chinese mainland, and the Japanese archipelago, offering new perspectives on Chinese and Japanese art. The most comprehensive survey of the history of Korean art available, this book: Offers a comprehensive account of Korean visual culture through history, including contemporary developments and trends Presents two dozen articles and numerous high quality illustrations Discusses visual and material artifacts of Korean art kept in various archives and collections worldwide Provides theoretical and interpretive balance on the subject of Korean art Helps instructors and scholars of Asian art history incorporate Korean visual arts in their research and teaching The definitive and authoritative reference on the subject, A Companion to Korean Art is indispensable for scholars and academics working in areas of Asian visual arts, university students in Asian and Korean art courses, and general readers interested in the art, culture, and history of Korea.
Book Synopsis Performing Filial Piety in Northern Song China by : Cong Ellen Zhang
Download or read book Performing Filial Piety in Northern Song China written by Cong Ellen Zhang and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2020-09-30 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Educated men in Song-dynasty China (960–1279) traveled frequently in search of scholarly and bureaucratic success. These extensive periods of physical mobility took them away from their families, homes, and native places for long periods of time, preventing them from fulfilling their most sacred domestic duty: filial piety to their parents. In this deeply grounded work, Cong Ellen Zhang locates the tension between worldly ambition and family duty at the heart of elite social and cultural life. Drawing on more than two thousand funerary biographies and other official and private writing, Zhang argues that the predicament in which Song literati found themselves diminished neither the importance of filial piety nor the appeal of participating in examinations and government service. On the contrary, the Northern Song witnessed unprecedented literati activity and state involvement in the bolstering of ancient forms of filial performances and the promotion of new ones. The result was the triumph of a new filial ideal: luyang. By labeling highly coveted honors and privileges attainable solely through scholarly and official accomplishments as the most celebrated filial acts, the luyang rhetoric elevated office-holding men to be the most filial of sons. Consequently, the proper performance of filiality became essential to scholar-official identity and self-representation. Zhang convincingly demonstrates that this reconfiguration of elite male filiality transformed filial piety into a status- and gender-based virtue, a change that had wide implications for elite family life and relationships in the Northern Song. The separation of elite men from their parents and homes also made the idea of “native place” increasingly fluid. This development in turn generated an interest in family preservation as filial performance. Individually initiated, kinship- and native place-based projects flourished and coalesced with the moral and cultural visions of leading scholar-intellectuals, providing the social and familial foundations for the ascendancy of Neo-Confucianism as well as new cultural norms that transformed Chinese society in the Song and beyond.
Book Synopsis The Art of the Chinese Picture-Scroll by : Shane McCausland
Download or read book The Art of the Chinese Picture-Scroll written by Shane McCausland and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2023-10-25 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first extended history of the Chinese picture-scroll. The Chinese picture-scroll, a long, horizontal painting or calligraphic work, has been China’s pre-eminent aesthetic form throughout the last two millennia. This first history of the picture-scroll explores its extraordinary longevity and adaptability to social, political, and technological change. The book describes what the picture-scroll demands of a viewer, how China’s artists grappled with its cultural power, and how collectors and connoisseurs left their marks on scrolls for later generations to judge.
Download or read book Countless Sands written by Jeffrey Moser and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2024-12-31 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Countless Sands presents engaging analyses of the diverse relationships between Buddhism and the environment that existed in medieval Asia. Recent years have witnessed a surge in publications across the humanities that advance powerful ethical and political arguments to account for the human failure to respond effectively to global climate change. While the contributors to this volume are attuned to this challenge, rather than present explicit political arguments, they pursue a subtler effort to historicize the environment as a site and subject of Buddhist practice while providing research grounded in rigorous analysis of complex and fragmentary sources. The volume thereby mitigates against the Orientalist, East-West binaries that have long informed the invocation of Buddhism in Euro-American environmental discourses. As the chapters collectively demonstrate, there was no singular, consistently “Buddhist” understanding of the natural world, but innumerable, varied engagements preserved in discrete texts, images, and artifacts. Through specific case studies, the authors consider such questions as: How did premodern Buddhists understand what we today call “the environment”? How did they think about their earth? How, when, and where did the various processes of the earth actually impinge on the practices of historical Buddhists? What kinds of “environmental imaginations” informed specific Buddhist practices? In so doing, the authors explore the connections between the ways in which historical Buddhist communities interacted with their environments and how they understood those environments. In the broader field of Buddhist studies, Countless Sands contributes to ongoing efforts to expand the locus of inquiry from textually based investigations of Buddhist doctrine to a broader examination of the complex and varied place of Buddhism in the lives of historical communities. The book furthers this broader process by casting it in environmental terms and will engage readers looking for models of thought-provoking historical analysis on environmental themes.
Book Synopsis Visual Culture in Contemporary China by : Xiaobing Tang
Download or read book Visual Culture in Contemporary China written by Xiaobing Tang and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-08 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores China's rich visual culture from the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 to the present day.
Book Synopsis Carving Status at Kŭmgangsan by : Maya K. H. Stiller
Download or read book Carving Status at Kŭmgangsan written by Maya K. H. Stiller and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2021-12-17 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: North Korea’s Kŭmgangsan is one of Asia’s most celebrated sacred mountain ranges, comparable in fame to Mount Tai in China and Mount Fuji in Japan. Carving Status at Kŭmgangsan marks a paradigm shift in the research about East Asian mountains by introducing an entirely new field: autographic rock graffiti. The book details how late Chosŏn (ca. 1600–1900 CE) Korean elite travelers used Kŭmgangsan to demonstrate their high social status by carving inscriptions, naming sites, and joining the literary pedigree of visitors to renowned locales. Such travel practices show how social competition emerged in the spatial context of a landscape. Hence, Carving Status at Kŭmgangsan argues for an expansion of accepted historical narratives on travel and mountain space in premodern East Asia. Rather than interpreting pilgrimage routes as exclusively religious or tourist, in Kŭmgangsan’s case they were also an important site of collective memory. Embarking on a journey to Kŭmgangsan to view and contribute to its sites of memory was an endeavor that late Chosŏn Koreans hoped to achieve in their lives. Based on multidisciplinary research drawing on literary writings, court records, gazetteers, maps, songs, calligraphy, and paintings, Carving Status at Kŭmgangsan is the first historical study of this practice. It will appeal to scholars in fields ranging from East Asian history, literature, and geography, to pilgrimage studies and art history.
Book Synopsis Protecting the Dharma through Calligraphy in Tang China by : Pietro De Laurentis
Download or read book Protecting the Dharma through Calligraphy in Tang China written by Pietro De Laurentis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a study of the earliest and finest collated inscription in the history of Chinese calligraphy, the Ji Wang shengjiao xu 集王聖教序 (Preface to the Sacred Teaching Scriptures Translated by Xuanzang in Wang Xizhi’s Collated Characters), which was erected on January 1, 673. The stele records the two texts written by the Tang emperors Taizong (599–649) and Gaozong (628–683) in honor of the monk Xuanzang (d. 664) and the Buddhist scripture Xin jing (Heart Sutra), collated in the semi-cursive characters of the great master of Chinese calligraphy, Wang Xizhi (303–361). It is thus a Buddhist inscription that combines Buddhist authority, political power, and artistic charm in one single monument. The present book reconstructs the multifaceted context in which the stele was devised, aiming at highlighting the specific role calligraphy played in the propagation and protection of Buddhism in medieval China.
Book Synopsis Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction by : Li Guo
Download or read book Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction written by Li Guo and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women’s tanci, or “plucking rhymes,” are chantefable narratives written by upper-class educated women from seventeenth-century to early twentieth-century China. Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women’s Tanci Fiction offers a timely study on early modern Chinese women’s representations of gender, nation, and political activism in their tanci works before and after the Taiping Rebellion (1850 to 1864), as well as their depictions of warfare and social unrest. Women tanci authors’ redefinition of female exemplarity within the Confucian orthodox discourses of virtue, talent, chastity, and political integrity could be bourgeoning expressions of female exceptionalism and could have foreshadowed protofeminist ideals of heroism. They establish a realistic tenor in affirming feminine domestic authority, and open up spaces for discussions of “womanly becoming,” female exceptionalism, and shifting family power structures. The vernacular mode underlying these texts yields productive possibilities of gendered self-representations, bodily valences, and dynamic performances of sexual roles. The result is a vernacular discursive frame that enables women’s appropriation and refashioning of orthodox moral values as means of self-affirmation and self-realization. Validations of women’s political activism and loyalism to the nation attest to tanci as a premium vehicle for disseminating progressive social incentives to popular audiences. Women’s tanci marks early modern writers’ endeavors to carve out a space of feminine becoming, a discursive arena of feminine appropriation, reinvention, and boundary-crossings. In this light, women’s tanci portrays gendered mobility through depictions of a heroine’s voyages or social ascent, and entails a forward-moving historical progression toward a more autonomous and vested model of feminine subjectivity.
