The Efficacious Landscape
The Efficacious Landscape

Author: Ping Foong

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-05-18

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 168417547X

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"Ink landscape painting is a distinctive feature of the Northern Song, and painters of this era produced some of the most celebrated artworks in Chinese history. The Efficacious Landscape addresses how landmark works of this pivotal period first came to be identified as potent symbols of imperial authority and later became objects through which exiled scholars expressed disaffection and dissent. In fulfilling these diverse roles, landscape demonstrated its efficacy in communicating through embodiment and in transcending the limitations of the concrete. Building on decades of monographic writings on Song painting, this carefully researched study presents a syncretic vision of how ink landscape evolved within the eleventh-century court community of artists, scholars, and aristocrats. Detailed visual analyses of surviving works and new insight about key landscapes by the court painter Guo Xi support the perspective put forward here and introduce original methodologies for interpreting painting as an integral element of political and cultural history. By focusing on the efforts of emperors, empresses, and eunuchs to cultivate ink landscape and its iconography, this investigation also tackles the social and class dichotomies that have long defined and frustrated existing scholarship on this period’s paintings, highlighting instead the interconnectedness of painting practice’s elite modalities."

Efficacious Underworld
Efficacious Underworld

Author: Cheeyun Lilian Kwon

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2019-02-28

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0824856023

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The Ten Kings hanging scrolls at Tokyo’s Seikadō Bunko Art Museum are among the most resplendent renderings of the Buddhist purgatory extant, but their origin and significance have yet to be fully explored. Cheeyun Kwon unfurls this exquisite set of scrolls within the existing Ten Kings painting tradition while investigating textual, scriptural, archaeological, and visual materials from East Asia to shed light on its possible provenance. She constructs a model scheme of the paintings’ evolution based on more than five hundred works and reveals channels of popularization, mass production, and agglomeration. The earliest images of the Ten Kings are found in the tenth-century sūtra The Scripture on the Ten Kings, known to be the work of the monk Zangchuan. By the mid-twelfth century, typological conventions associated with the Ten Kings were widely established, and paintings depicting them, primarily large-scale and stand-alone, became popular export commodities, spreading via land and sea routes to the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago. An examination of materials in Korea suggests a unique development path for Ten Kings subject matter, and this—in conjunction with a close analysis of the Seikadō paintings—forms the core of Kwon’s book. Among the Korean works discussed is a woodblock edition of The Scripture on the Ten Kings from 1246. It is markedly different from its Chinese counterparts and provides strong evidence of the subject’s permutations during the Koryŏ period (918–1392), when Northern Song (960–1127) visual art and culture were avidly imported. In the Seikadō paintings, Northern Song figural, architectural, landscape, and decorative elements were acculturated to the Koryŏ milieu, situating them in the twelfth to early thirteenth centuries and among the oldest and most significant surviving examples of Koryŏ Buddhist painting. Efficacious Underworld fills major lacunae in Korean, East Asian, and Ten Kings painting traditions while illuminating Korea’s contribution to the evolution of a Buddhist theme on its trajectory across East Asia. With its rich set of color reproductions and detailed analysis of textual and visual materials, this volume will invite significant revision to previously held notions on Koryŏ painting.

Fixing Landscape
Fixing Landscape

Author: Corey Byrnes

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2019-01-15

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0231547129

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In 1994, workers broke ground on China’s Three Gorges Dam. By its completion in 2012, the dam had transformed the ecology of the Yangzi River, displaced over a million people, and forever altered a landscape immortalized in centuries of literature and art. The controversial history of the dam is well known; what this book uncovers are its unexpected connections to the cultural traditions it seems to sever. By reconsidering the dam in relation to the aesthetic history of the Three Gorges region over more than two millennia, Fixing Landscape offers radically new ways of thinking about cultural and spatial production in contemporary China. Corey Byrnes argues that this monumental feat of engineering can only be understood by confronting its status as a techno-poetic act, a form of landscaping indebted to both the technical knowledge of engineers and to the poetic legacies of the Gorges as cultural site. Synthesizing methods drawn from premodern, modern, and contemporary Chinese studies, as well as from critical geography, art history, and the environmental humanities, Byrnes offers innovative readings of eighth-century poetry, paintings from the twelfth through twenty-first centuries, contemporary film, nineteenth-century British travelogues, and Chinese and Western maps, among other sources. Fixing Landscape shows that premodern poetry and visual art have something urgent to tell us about a contemporary experiment in spatial production. Poems and paintings may not build dams, but Byrnes argues that the Three Gorges Dam would not exist as we know it without them.

The Social Life of Inkstones
The Social Life of Inkstones

Author: Dorothy Ko

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780295999180

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An inkstone, a piece of polished stone no bigger than an outstretched hand, is an instrument for grinding ink, an object of art, a token of exchange between friends or sovereign states, and a surface on which texts and images are carved. As such, the inkstone has been entangled with elite masculinity and the values of wen (culture, literature, civility) in China, Korea, and Japan for more than a millennium. However, for such a ubiquitous object in East Asia, it is virtually unknown in the Western world. Examining imperial workshops in the Forbidden City, the Duan quarries in Guangdong, the commercial workshops in Suzhou, and collectors' homes in Fujian, The Social Life of Inkstones traces inkstones between court and society and shows how collaboration between craftsmen and scholars created a new social order in which the traditional hierarchy of "head over hand" no longer predominated. Dorothy Ko also highlights the craftswoman Gu Erniang, through whose work the artistry of inkstone-making achieved unprecedented refinement between the 1680s and 1730s. The Social Life of Inkstones explores the hidden history and cultural significance of the inkstone and puts the stonecutters and artisans on center stage. A William Sangki and Nanhee Min Hahn Book

Landscape and Space
Landscape and Space

Author: Jaś Elsner

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 0192845950

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Landscape has been a key theme in world archaeology and trans-cultural art history over the last half century, particularly in the study of painting in art history and in all questions of human intervention and the placement of monuments in the natural world within archaeology. However, the representation of landscape has been rather less addressed in the scholarship of the archaeologically-accessed visual cultures of the ancient world. The kinds of reliefs, objects, and paintings discussed here have a significant purchase on matters concerned with landscape and space in the visual sphere, but were discovered within archaeological contexts and by means of excavation. Through case studies focused on the invention of wilderness imagery in ancient China, the relation of monuments to landscape in ancient Greece, the place of landscape painting in Mesoamerican Maya art, and the construction of sacred landscape across Eurasia between Stonehenge and the Silk Road via Pompeii, this book emphasises the importance of thinking about models of landscape in ancient art, as well as the value of comparative approaches in underlining core aspects of the topic. Notably, it explores questions of space, both actual and conceptual, including how space is configured through form and representation.

Designing Boundaries in Early China
Designing Boundaries in Early China

Author: Garret Pagenstecher Olberding

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-11-18

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1009084062

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Ancient Chinese walls, such as the Great Wall of China, were not sovereign border lines. Instead, sovereign space was zonally exerted with monarchical powers expressed gradually over an area, based on possibilities for administrative action. The dynamically shifting, ritualized articulation of early Chinese sovereignty affects the interpretation of the spatial application of state force, including its cartographic representations. In Designing Boundaries in Early China, Garret Pagenstecher Olberding draws on a wide array of source materials concerning the territorialization of space to make a compelling case for how sovereign spaces were defined and regulated in this part of the ancient world. By considering the ways sovereignty extended itself across vast expanses in early China, Olberding informs our understanding of the ancient world and the nature of modern nation-states.

Confronting Images
Confronting Images

Author: Georges Didi-Huberman

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 9780271024714

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According to Didi-Huberman, visual representation has an "underside" in which intelligible forms lose clarity and defy rational understanding. Art historians, he contends, fail to engage this underside, and he suggests that art historians look to Freud's concept of the "dreamwork", a mobile process that often involves substitution and contradiction.

A Theory of /Cloud/
A Theory of /Cloud/

Author: Hubert Damisch

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780804734400

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This is the first in a series of books in which one of the most influential of contemporary art theorists revised from within the conceptions underlying the history of art. The author’s basic idea is that the rigor of linear perspective cannot encompass all of visual experience and that it could be said to generate an oppositional factor with which it interacts dialectically: the cloud. On a literal level, this could be represented by the absence of the sky, as in Brunelleschi’s legendary first experiments with panels using perspective. Or it could be the vaporous swathes that Correggio uses to mediate between the viewer on earth and the heavenly prospect in his frescoed domes at Parma. Insofar as the cloud is a semiotic operator, interacting with the linear order of perspective, it also becomes a dynamic agent facilitating the creation of new types of pictorial space. (Damisch puts the signifer cloud between slashes to indicate that he deals with clouds as signs instead of realistic elements.) This way of looking at the history of painting is especially fruitful for the Renaissance and Baroque periods, but it is also valuable for looking at such junctures as the nineteenth century. For example, Damisch invokes Ruskin and Turner, who carry out both in theory and in practice a revision of the conditions of appearances of the cloud as a landscape feature. Even for the twentieth century, he has illuminating things to say about how his reading of cloud applies to the painters Leger and Batthus. In short, Damisch achieves a brilliant and systematic demonstration of a concept of semiotic interaction that touches some of the most crucial features of the Western art tradition.

Living Systems
Living Systems

Author: Liat Margolis

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2008-02-01

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 3764377003

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The use of innovative new materials is an important trend in landscape architecture today. These materials include biodegradable geotextiles, super-absorbent polymers, and plants that react to changing soil conditions. This book presents the available materials and technologies in the context of practical applications.

Efficacious Underworld
Efficacious Underworld

Author: Cheeyun Lilian Kwon

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2019-02-28

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0824856058

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The Ten Kings hanging scrolls at Tokyo’s Seikadō Bunko Art Museum are among the most resplendent renderings of the Buddhist purgatory extant, but their origin and significance have yet to be fully explored. Cheeyun Kwon unfurls this exquisite set of scrolls within the existing Ten Kings painting tradition while investigating textual, scriptural, archaeological, and visual materials from East Asia to shed light on its possible provenance. She constructs a model scheme of the paintings’ evolution based on more than five hundred works and reveals channels of popularization, mass production, and agglomeration. The earliest images of the Ten Kings are found in the tenth-century sūtra The Scripture on the Ten Kings, known to be the work of the monk Zangchuan. By the mid-twelfth century, typological conventions associated with the Ten Kings were widely established, and paintings depicting them, primarily large-scale and stand-alone, became popular export commodities, spreading via land and sea routes to the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago. An examination of materials in Korea suggests a unique development path for Ten Kings subject matter, and this—in conjunction with a close analysis of the Seikadō paintings—forms the core of Kwon’s book. Among the Korean works discussed is a woodblock edition of The Scripture on the Ten Kings from 1246. It is markedly different from its Chinese counterparts and provides strong evidence of the subject’s permutations during the Koryŏ period (918–1392), when Northern Song (960–1127) visual art and culture were avidly imported. In the Seikadō paintings, Northern Song figural, architectural, landscape, and decorative elements were acculturated to the Koryŏ milieu, situating them in the twelfth to early thirteenth centuries and among the oldest and most significant surviving examples of Koryŏ Buddhist painting. Efficacious Underworld fills major lacunae in Korean, East Asian, and Ten Kings painting traditions while illuminating Korea’s contribution to the evolution of a Buddhist theme on its trajectory across East Asia. With its rich set of color reproductions and detailed analysis of textual and visual materials, this volume will invite significant revision to previously held notions on Koryŏ painting.