Drawing on museum collections and archaeological sites previously closed to Westerners, a group of scholars traces the development of Chinese painting over three millennia

Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting (The Culture & Civilization of China)

Arts & Photography

Barnhart, Professor Richard

Xin, Yang

Chongzheng, Nie

Cahill, Professor James

Shaojun, Lang

Wu, Hung

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

From Neolithic painted petroglyphs, early paintings on silk, and landscapes by twelfth-century literati to the traditional handscrolls being produced today, Chinese painting has always had the power to enthrall. This magnificent book, written by a team of eminent international scholars, is the first to recount the history of Chinese painting over a span of some three thousand years. Drawing on museum collections, archives, and archaeological sites in China—including many resources never before available to Western scholars—as well as on collections in other countries, the authors present and analyze the very best examples of Chinese painting: more than 300 of them are reproduced here in color. Both accessible to the general reader and revelatory for the scholar, the book provides the most up-to-date and detailed history of China’s pictorial art available today. In this book the authors rewrite the history of Chinese art wherever it is found—in caves, temples, or museum collections. They begin by grounding the Western reader in Chinese traditions and practices, showing in essence how to look at a Chinese painting. They then shed light on such topics as the development of classical and narrative painting, the origins of the literati tradition, the flowering of landscape painting, and the ways the traditions of Chinese painting have been carried into the present day. The book, which concludes with a glossary of techniques and terms and a list of artists by dynasty, is an essential resource for all lovers of, or newcomers to, Chinese painting. Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting is the inaugural volume in a new series, The Culture &amp; Civilization of China, a joint publishing venture of Yale University Press and the American Council of Learned Societies with the China International Publishing Group in Beijing. The undertaking will ultimately result in the publication of more than seventy-five volumes on the visual arts, classical literature, language, and philosophy, as well as several comprehensive reference volumes.

Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting

Hung, Wu

BARNHART, Richard M.

Cahill, James

Barnhart, Richard

The most up-to-date and detailed exploration of China's magnificent sculptural heritage Sculpture is becoming known as one of China’s great arts. Neolithic figurines, rows upon rows of underground terra-cotta statues, exquisite bronzes, Buddhas carved in cave walls—all these are part of a vast sculptural heritage. This gorgeous book, written by a team of eminent international scholars, is the first to offer a comprehensive history of Chinese sculpture. Spanning some seven thousand years, Chinese Sculpture explores a beautiful and diverse world of objects, many of which have come to light in recent decades. 
The authors analyze and present, mostly in color, more than five hundred examples of Chinese sculpture, dividing China’s rich and complex sculptural legacy into two parts—secular (tomb and mortuary art) and religious (Buddhist, Confucianist, and Daoist art). Throughout, the authors highlight the inventiveness, purposes, and brilliant execution of Chinese sculpture and comment on how the country’s culture nurtured the practical and intellectual choices that shaped its sculptural traditions over the millennia.

Chinese Sculpture

Howard, Angela Falco

Li, Song

杨红

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. Leading scholar of Chinese art Wu Hung shows how the story of ruins in China is different from but connected to "ruin culture" in the West. He investigates 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.
 Analyzing a broad variety of traditional and contemporary visual materials, including painting, architecture, photography, prints, and cinema, Wu also embraces a wide variety of subjects--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.

A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture

Princeton University Press

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

Chinese Art and Dynastic Time (The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts)

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.

The Wu Liang Shrine: The Ideology of Early Chinese Pictorial Art

Stanford University Press

Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture

Chinese decorative, pictorial, and architectural forms, often approached as separate traditions, are here explained as a broad artistic movement and contextualized as part of a well-defined cultural and political tradition. The book begins with the first comprehensive explanation of "ritual art." This native genre encompasses ceremonial pottery, jades, and bronzes, which, though often small and hidden, manifest a unique sense of the monumental. The author traces the decline of this archaic tradition and the corresponding rise of palatial and funerary monuments against the background of China's transition from a network of principalities to a unified political state. He portrays the continual reinvention of the city in China as he analyzes the history of the Western Han capital, Chang'an, and brings to life the individual motives of builder, mourner, and deceased in discussing the unprecedented construction and decoration of mortuary monuments during the Eastern Han. The book concludes by reexamining what is arguably the most important event in Chinese art history: the appearance of individual artists during the post-Han period and their transformation of public monumental art into a private idiom.

Stanford Univ Pr

No other civilization in the premodern world was more obsessed with constructing underground burial structures than China, where for at least five thousand years people devoted a great amount of wealth and labor to build tombs and furnish them with exquisite objects and images. The hope of providing the dead with an eternal home stimulated artistic creativity and technological innovation, making the tomb a persistent site of art production as well as a comprehensive ensemble of various art forms. For the most part, tombs have been mainly appreciated as "treasure troves," the contents of which has allowed art historians to rewrite histories of individual art forms such as bronze, jade, sculpture, and painting. But tombs have served this role at the expense of being fragmented in both preservation and analysis: The integrity of a tomb is obscured when it dissolves into medium-oriented classification and research.
New trends in Chinese art history are now placing the entire burial (rather than its individual components) at the center of observation and interpretation. The present book takes this to the next level by focusing on interpretive methods. It argues that to achieve a genuine understanding of Chinese tombs we need to reconsider a host of art historical concepts (including visuality, viewership, space, formal analysis, function, and context) and derive an analytical framework from the three most essential aspects of any manufactured work: spatiality, materiality, and temporality. Chapters discuss the symbolic environments constructed inside a tomb and the "subject spaces" created for the disembodied soul; how and why certain materials, mediums, shapes, and colors were selected for tomb architecture and furniture; and lastly how spaces, objects, and images work together to evoke temporalities such as past, future, or eternity and generate a sense of movement inside a sealed space. The final coda brings all of these threads together in a portrayal of three important tombs from different periods.

The Art of the Yellow Springs: Understanding Chinese Tombs

University of Hawaii Press

Rong Rong's East Village, 1993-1998

Photography & Video

Distributed by Art Media Resources

Beautiful book of the artist's work.

Shu: Reinventing Books in Contemporary Chinese Art

Peggy Wang

China Institute Gallery

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