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5 books match the query 'Painting, Chinese'

cover of An Index to Reproductions of Paintings by Twentieth-Century Chinese Artists

An Index to Reproductions of Paintings by Twentieth-Century Chinese Artists

Ellen Johnston Laing

University of Michigan Press, 1998

In the second half of the twentieth century, studies in Chinese painting history have been greatly aided by several major lists of Chinese artists and their works. Published between 1956 and 1980, these lists were limited to Imperial China.
The current index covers the period from 1912 to around 1980. It includes the names of approximately 3,500 traditional-style artists along with lists of their works, reproduced in some 264 monographs, books, journals, and catalogs published from the 1920s to around 1980. With a few exceptions, artists working after 1949 outside continental China are excluded.
Revised Edition, 1998; first published by the Asian Studies Program, University of Oregon, 1984.
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cover of Chinese Paintings in Chinese Publications, 1956–1968: An Annotated Bibliography and Index to the Paintings

Chinese Paintings in Chinese Publications, 1956–1968

An Annotated Bibliography and Index to the Paintings

Ellen Johnston Laing

University of Michigan Press, 1969

This bibliography includes publications issued between 1956 and August 1968 that reproduce Chinese paintings now in Chinese public or private collections. The great majority of these publications were produced in Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Japan. Each publication included in the bibliography has been provided with a detailed physical description of the publication itself: the amounts of text , the number of plates in color and in monochrome, and a general evaluation of the quality of the reproductions. The title by which each work is referred to in the index is included at the end of each entry.
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cover of The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject through Painting

The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject through Painting

François Jullien

University of Chicago Press, 2009

In premodern China, elite painters used imagery not to mirror the world around them, but to evoke unfathomable experience. Considering their art alongside the philosophical traditions that inform it, The Great Image Has No Form explores the “nonobject”—a notion exemplified by paintings that do not seek to represent observable surroundings.

François Jullien argues that this nonobjectifying approach stems from the painters’ deeply held belief in a continuum of existence, in which art is not distinct from reality. Contrasting this perspective with the Western notion of art as separate from the world it represents, Jullien investigates the theoretical conditions that allow us to apprehend, isolate, and abstract objects. His comparative method lays bare the assumptions of Chinese and European thought, revitalizing the questions of what painting is, where it comes from, and what it does. Provocative and intellectually vigorous, this sweeping inquiry introduces new ways of thinking about the relationship of art to the ideas in which it is rooted.

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cover of The Painting of T'ang Yin

The Painting of T'ang Yin

Anne De Coursey Clapp

University of Chicago Press, 1991

+This richly illustrated volume documents the art and fully examines the career of the sixteenth-century Chinese master T'ang Yin. One of the four great painters of the middle Ming period, the ambitious T'ang Yin rose above the merchant class into which he was born to become a member of the elite scholarly circle in the city of Suchou. Deprived by accident of his academic degrees and so forced to paint for a living, T'ang Yin became a social anomaly whose style of life cut across the conventions of his time. His experiences throw into sharp relief the realities faced by a Chinese painter who was both elite Confucian scholar and professional painter.

Anne De Coursey Clapp's work also explores larger issues of Ming painting raised by the artist's turbulent career. She describes the social and intellectual values exalted in Ming Suchou, its system of patronage, the contrast between the professional and amateur artist, and the formative influence of twelfth-century Sung dynasty styles on Suchou painters. Clapp shows how T'ang Yin's artistic inventions were made in the course of leading the revival of Sung dynasty styles in Suchou: tracing T'ang Yin's early studies of ancient and contemporary masters, she describes how he reworked an antique style, converting it into a vehicle of expression that reached fruition in a long series of fresh and powerful paintings of landscapes and birds-and-flowers. In the process, she revises the distorted version of middle Ming painting written by later Chinese art theorists to justify their own social and artistic values, noting especially the role of art patrons and their effect on artistic production.

Clapp analyzes the increasing currency of painting as a means of social exchange in ancient China. In particular, she identifies commemorative painting as a major genre of the later dynasties and explores the role it played in the oeuvres of professional masters with its humanistic implications for the Chinese view of the ideal scholarly man. Her broad view of T'ang Yin's career shows him divided between the professional and amateur camps of his time: in landscape and figural subjects he was aligned with the professionals; in flower subjects with the amateurs. Clap argues that the uneven distribution of styles and genres between this master who was subject to the market, and those who were independent of it, suggests that T'ang deliberately tried to expand the range of his paintings in order to appeal to buyers in the lower educational and social strata. Illustrated by some of T'ang Yin's most celebrated paintings and by some which are published for the first time, her work is of tremendous importance to art, literary, and cultural historians of Ming China.

"In this important work, Anne de Coursey Clapp has drawn a clear picture of T'ang Yin's life, patronage relationships, and contribution to the history of Chinese painting. In the person of T'ang Yin, she has chosen an ideal focus around which to examine some of the misleading stereotypes
which have distorted our understanding of Chinese painting since the seventeenth century. Marked by analytical clarity and scrupulous scholarship, her work is a welcome addition to the few works in English on individual Chinese artists."—Louise Yuhas, Occidental College
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cover of Two Twelfth-Century Texts on Chinese Painting

Two Twelfth-Century Texts on Chinese Painting

Robert J. Maeda, Translator

University of Michigan Press, 1970

Two Twelfth-Century Texts on Chinese Painting presents two texts in translation that provide dual insight into the Painting Academy of Emperor Hui-tsung and the literati school of painting.
The Shan-shui ch’un-ch’uan chi is a treatise for beginning landscape painters dated to the Hsüan-ho era. The treatise was written by Han Cho, a reputed member of the Academy, but the text was not specifically directed at Academicians. The treatise collects and orders previous writings on landscape painting; one of Han Cho’s main goals is to list all landscape definitions and their practical application in painting. Yet his view is more detached and analytical than a stereotypical Academy painter, revealing an approach reminiscent of Confucian scholarship and literati painting as well.
The Hua-chi by Teng Ch’un is a history of painting that was written as a sequel to two earlier painting histories. In ten chapters, Teng Ch’un compiles facts and critical evaluations of painters from 1075 to 1167, as well as listings of selected masterpieces. Teng Ch’un provides more specific information about the Academy than Han Cho, discussing its organization and examination system, and noting that “form-likeness” and adherence to rules were leading standards for painting in the Academy. On the other hand, he thinks that painting should transmit “soul,” not just “form.” Thus, Teng Ch’un writes the history of both the establishment values of the Academy and the intellectual tendencies of the literati.
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