ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Shane McCausland is the Percival David Professor of the History of Art at SOAS University of London. His many books include The Mongol Century: Visual Cultures of Yuan China, 1271–1368, also published by Reaktion Books.

REVIEWS

“Eruditely written. . . . A welcome addition to the corpus of studies on Chinese painting, written by a scholar deeply immersed in the subject and well able to share his knowledge with the reader in an engaging and lively way.”

— Nick Pearce, professor and Richmond Chair of Fine Arts, University of Glasgow

"Lavishly illustrated and lucidly expounded, this is the first book that extols the remarkable potentiality of the handscroll format in Chinese painting. Covering a wide timespan of more than fifteen hundred years, the book demonstrates how the format can foster multiple perspectives and stimulate thoughts on the historiography, materiality, and affective affordances of Chinese painting."

— Cheng-hua Wang, Princeton University

"Exploring its extraordinary longevity and its adaptability to social, political and technological change, the first extended history of the picture-scroll, China's pre-eminent aesthetic format of the last two millennia."

— The Bookseller

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
Chapter One On Origins and Uses over the First Millennium
Chapter Two Inscribing the Artist and the Collector: The Picture-Scroll in the Song–Liao–Jin Period
Chapter Three Handscrolls in Mongol Palaces
Chapter Four Musing on Shadows: Reading the Ming Picture-Scroll
Chapter Five Qing: Reading the ‘Baroque’ Handscroll
Chapter Six Modernist Uses of the Chinese Picture-Scroll
Chapter Seven The Medium of Silent Poetry in the Late Modern World

References
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Index

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