Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China is not simply a survey of sixteenth-century images, but rather, a thorough and thoughtful examination of visual culture in China's Ming Dynasty, one that considers images wherever they appeared—not only paintings, but also illustrated books, maps, ceramic bowls, lacquered boxes, painted fans, and even clothing and tomb pictures.Clunas's theory of visuality incorporates not only the image and the object upon which it is placed but also the culture which produced and purchased it. Economic changes in sixteenth-century China—the rapid expansion of trade routes and a growing class of consumers—are thus intricately bound up with the evolution of the image itself. Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China will be a touchstone for students of Chinese history, art, and culture.

Product Description: China boasts a history of art stretching over 5,000 years and embracing a vast array of forms--objects of jade, lacquer and porcelain, painted scrolls and fans, sculptures in stone, bronze and wood, and murals. With more than 130 halftone illustrations, including almost eighty in full color, this new edition of Art in China presents the finest one-volume introduction to all forms of Chinese art...read more

Product Description: This book takes an innovative approach to one of the great figures of Chinese culture, the writer and painter Wen Zhengming (1470­-1559). Renowned as one of the great 'scholar painters' of the Ming dynasty, Wen was enmeshed in a complex web of social obligations, his 'elegant debts' as he called them, which led to many of his most celebrated works...read more

Product Description: This outstanding and original book, presented here with a new preface, examines the history of material culture in early modern China. Craig Clunas analyzes "superfluous things"--the paintings, calligraphy, bronzes, ceramics, carved jade, and other objects owned by the elites of Ming China--and describes contemporary attitudes to them...read more

Product Description: Gardens are sites that can be at one and the same time admired works of art and valuable pieces of real estate. As the first account in English to be wholly based on contemporary Chinese sources, this beautifully illustrated book grounds the practices of garden-making in Ming Dynasty China (1369–1644) firmly in the social and cultural history of the day...read more

Product Description: Presented here is a wide-ranging history of Chinese carving, from the Shang period to today. First as export items, and later in museum collections, these carvings have strongly influenced the way the Western world views Chinese culture...read more

Product Description: Illustrating the superb collection of Chinese furniture in the Victoria & Albert Museum, this volume is a detailed investigative study which combines material, textural and pictorial evidence to present a balanced view of the furniture and the society that produced it...read more

Product Description: Gardens are sites that can be at one and the same time admired works of art and valuable pieces of real estate, and this study places the practices of garden-making in China during the Ming dynasty (1369-1644) in the social and cultural history of the day...read more

Product Description: With fabulous illustrations of objects from a unique collection of Chinese art, this comprehensive volume reveals the splendors of seven thousand years of Chinese culture, from the elegant mansions of privileged Chinese citizens to the splendid setting of the Imperial Court...read more

Product Description: This book examines the production of luxury goods for export to European, and later to American markets by the highly developed Chinese craft market in the period following the arrival of the first Portuguese in 1514. Individual chapters concentrate on the production of silk, lacquer and furniture, carving, metalwork, wallpaper and paintings, while three chapters deal with different aspects of ceramics production...read more