These crisp, black-and-white images will lend a distinctive Far Eastern accent to any project. Hundreds of eye-catching images include geometrics, abstracts, optical illusions, plus other intriguing configurations that adapt easily for use as spot illustrations or as repeating patterns. Professional and amateur artists, illustrators, and designers will find this inexpensive treasury a priceless source of royalty-free inspiration.
With over 300 different patterns in attractive color schemes, this book is perfect for surface pattern design. Each page uses a starting motif from which four border patterns are generated. These can be put to use for any designs that require a border. Examples include web design, picture frames and architectural friezes. The patterns are geometric in nature and the motifs include variations on all the basic polygons as well as unique patterns created by the author.
An incomparable look at how Chinese artists have used mass production to assemble exquisite objects from standardized parts Chinese workers in the third century BC created seven thousand life-sized terracotta soldiers to guard the tomb of the First Emperor. In the eleventh century AD, Chinese builders constructed a pagoda from as many as thirty thousand separately carved wooden pieces. As these examples show, throughout history, Chinese artisans have produced works of art in astonishing quantities, and have done so without sacrificing quality, affordability, or speed of manufacture. In this book, Lothar Ledderose takes us on a remarkable tour of Chinese art and culture to explain how artists used complex systems of mass production to assemble extraordinary objects from standardized parts or modules. He reveals how these systems have deep roots in Chinese thought and reflect characteristically Chinese modes of social organization. Combining invaluable aesthetic and cultural insights with a rich variety of illustrations, Ten Thousand Things make a profound statement about Chinese art and society.
This book contains 1,000 geometric tile patterns presented in full color. They can be used for a variety of art, design, and craftwork applications including architectural ornament, fashion design, graphic design, illustration and fine art, jewelry, knitting and needlecraft, logo and trademark creation, package design, pottery and ceramics, quilt patterns, rug and carpets, sculpture and metalwork, textile and clothing patterns, tiles, wallpaper patterns, and web and app design. This is the most comprehensive collection of such patterns and is available now for the first time. Samples from all of the major geometric categories are included. Brief descriptions of each category are provided along with a list of online and book resources. Alternate versions of each pattern are provided to serve as an inspiration for creating your own. Electronic copies of the images are available from the author.
Geometric wallpaper patterns for use in a wide variety of applications. Basic geometric shapes are modified and repeated to create intricate designs for use in web, graphic design and crafts. Ninety-six different patterns are presented in attractive color schemes. Perfect for surface pattern design. Use to create fabrics, quilts, ornament and more.
Dragons, fish, flowers, and foo dogs abound in this magnificent compilation of Chinese designs and motifs. An exotic archive of permission-free art, this volume offers 361 crisp black-and-white images in a wide variety of shapes and sizes that adapt themselves easily to use as spot illustrations, borders, and a host of other possibilities. Certain to lend a distinctive Far Eastern accent to any project, these evocative images will prove a treasury of inspiration for illustrators, graphic artists, and crafters.
China has an age-old zoomorphic tradition. The First Emperor was famously said to have had the heart of a tiger and a wolf. The names of foreign tribes were traditionally written with characters that included animal radicals. In modern times, the communist government frequently referred to Nationalists as “running dogs,” and President Xi Jinping, vowing to quell corruption at all levels, pledged to capture both “the tigers” and “the flies.” Splendidly illustrated with works ranging from Bronze Age vessels to twentieth-century conceptual pieces, this volume is a wide-ranging look at zoomorphic and anthropomorphic imagery in Chinese art. The contributors, leading scholars in Chinese art history and related fields, consider depictions of animals not as simple, one-for-one symbolic equivalents: they pursue in depth, in complexity, and in multiple dimensions the ways that Chinese have used animals from earliest times to the present day to represent and rhetorically stage complex ideas about the world around them, examining what this means about China, past and present. In each chapter, a specific example or theme based on real or mythic creatures is derived from religious, political, or other sources, providing the detailed and learned examination needed to understand the means by which such imagery was embedded in Chinese cultural life. Bronze Age taotie motifs, calendrical animals, zoomorphic modes in Tantric Buddhist art, Song dragons and their painters, animal rebuses, Heaven-sent auspicious horses and foreign-sent tribute giraffes, the fantastic specimens depicted in the Qing Manual of Sea Oddities, the weirdly indeterminate creatures found in the contemporary art of Huang Yong Ping—these and other notable examples reveal Chinese attitudes over time toward the animal realm, explore Chinese psychology and patterns of imagination, and explain some of the critical means and motives of Chinese visual culture. The Zoomorphic Imagination in Chinese Art and Culture will find a ready audience among East Asian art and visual culture specialists and those with an interest in literary or visual rhetoric. Contributors: Sarah Allan, Qianshen Bai, Susan Bush, Daniel Greenberg, Carmelita (Carma) Hinton, Judy Chungwa Ho, Kristina Kleutghen, Kathlyn Liscomb, Jennifer Purtle, Jerome Silbergeld, Henrik Sørensen, and Eugene Y. Wang.
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.
