Traditionally the "Chinese body" was approached as a totality and explained by sweeping comparisons of the differences that distinguished Chinese examples from their Western counterparts. Recently, scholars have argued that we must look at particular examples of Chinese images of the body and explore their intrinsic conceptual complexity and historical specificity.

The twelve contributors to this volume adopt a middle position. They agree that Chinese images are conditioned by indigenous traditions and dynamics of social interaction, but they seek to explain a general Chinese body and face by charting multiple, specific bodies and faces. All of the chapters are historical case studies and investigate particular images, such as Han dynasty tomb figurines; Buddhist texts and illustrations; pictures of deprivation, illness, deformity, and ghosts; clothing; formal portraiture; and modern photographs and films. From the diversity of art forms and historical periods studied, there emerges a more complex picture of ways that the visual culture of the body and face in China has served to depict the living, memorialize the dead, and present the unrepresentable in art.

Res 61/62, Sarcophagi, is guest edited by Wu Hung and Jas Elsner. It includes “Chinese coffins from the first millennium b.c. and early images of the afterworld” by Alain Thote; “Art and personhood” by Björn Ewald; “Western Han sarcophagi and the transformation of Chinese funerary art” by Zheng Yan; “Reading identity on Roman strigillated sarcophagi” by Janet Huskinson; “‘A Tomb Both Great and Blameless’” by Richard Neer; “Funerary Spatiality” by Lillian Lan-ying Tseng; “‘Nero’s Tomb’ and the crisis of the third century” by Edmund Thomas; “Jouissance of death?” by Eugene Wang; “Reading images without texts on Roman sarcophagi” by Paul Zanker; “Decorative imperatives between concealment and display” by Jas Elsner; “Han sarcophagi” by Wu Hung; “Framing the dead on Roman sarcophagi” by Verity Platt; “Presentation, (re)animation, and the enchantments of technology” by Finbarr Barry Flood; “Death panels” by T. J. Clark; and contributions to Documents and Discussions by Andrew Scherer and Roberta Bonetti. Also included are contributions to Lectures—Color by Alexandre Tokovinine, Cameron L. McNeil, Timothy W. Pugh and Leslie G. Cecil, Leonardo Lopez Lujàn, Douglas K. Charles, and Warren R. DeBoer.

Speaking about Chinese writing entails thinking about how writing speaks through various media. In the guises of the written character and its imprints, traces, or ruins, writing is more than textuality. The goal of this volume is to consider the relationship of writing to materiality in China’s literary history and to ponder the physical aspects of the production and circulation of writing. To speak of the thing-ness of writing is to understand it as a thing in constant motion, transported from one place or time to another, one genre or medium to another, one person or public to another.

Thinking about writing as the material product of a culture shifts the emphasis from the author as the creator and ultimate arbiter of a text’s meaning to the editors, publishers, collectors, and readers through whose hands a text is reshaped, disseminated, and given new meanings. By yoking writing and materiality, the contributors to this volume aim to bypass the tendency to oppose form and content, words and things, documents and artifacts, to rethink key issues in the interpretation of Chinese literary and visual culture.