The Construction of Space in Early China

The Construction of Space in Early China
Author: Mark Edward Lewis
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 514
Release: 2012-02-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0791482499

This book examines the formation of the Chinese empire through its reorganization and reinterpretation of its basic spatial units: the human body, the household, the city, the region, and the world. The central theme of the book is the way all these forms of ordered space were reshaped by the project of unification and how, at the same time, that unification was constrained and limited by the necessary survival of the units on which it was based. Consequently, as Mark Edward Lewis shows, each level of spatial organization could achieve order and meaning only within an encompassing, superior whole: the body within the household, the household within the lineage and state, the city within the region, and the region within the world empire, while each level still contained within itself the smaller units from which it was formed. The unity that was the empire's highest goal avoided collapse back into the original chaos of nondistinction only by preserving within itself the very divisions on the basis of family or region that it claimed to transcend.

Contemplating the Ancients

Contemplating the Ancients
Author: Audrey Spiro
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2023-11-10
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0520321081

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

Recarving China's Past

Recarving China's Past
Author: Cary Yee-Wei Liu
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 617
Release: 2005
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780300107975

The Wu Family shrines, one of the most important cultural monuments of early China, comprise approximately 50 stone slabs from the so-called Wu cemetery in Shandong province. This illustrated book examines the stone slabs and their rubbings, as artifactswith a complex cultural history from the second century to the present.

Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture

Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture
Author: Wu Hung
Publisher:
Total Pages: 376
Release: 1995
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780804724289

"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."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Memory and Agency in Ancient China

Memory and Agency in Ancient China
Author: Francis Allard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2018-12-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108472575

Applies the 'life history' of objects approach to China's prehistoric, early dynastic and more recent material culture.

The Cambridge History of Ancient China

The Cambridge History of Ancient China
Author: Michael Loewe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 1192
Release: 1999-03-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521470308

The Cambridge History of Ancient China provides a survey of the institutional and cultural history of pre-imperial China.

Art of the Yellow Springs

Art of the Yellow Springs
Author: Wu Hung
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2015-02-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1861897189

We might think the Egyptians were the masters of building tombs, but no other civilization has devoted more time and resources to underground burial structures than the Chinese. For at least five thousand years, from the fourth millennium B.C.E. to the early twentieth century, the Chinese have been building some of the world’s most elaborate tombs and furnishing them with exquisite objects. It is these objects and the concept of the tomb as a “treasure-trove” that The Art of the Yellow Springs seeks to critique, drawing on recent scholarship to examine memorial sites the way they were meant to be experienced: not as a mere store of individual works, but as a work of art itself. Wu Hung bolsters some of the new trends in Chinese art history that have been challenging the conventional ways of studying funerary art. Examining the interpretative methods themselves that guide the study of memorials, he argues that in order to understand Chinese tombs, one must not necessarily forget the individual works present in them—as the beautiful color plates here will prove—but consider them along with a host of other art-historical concepts. These include notions of visuality, viewership, space, analysis, function, and context. The result is a ground-breaking new assessment that demonstrates the amazing richness of one of the longest-running traditions in the whole of art history.

Bulletin

Bulletin
Author: Östasiatiska museet
Publisher:
Total Pages: 460
Release: 1982
Genre: China
ISBN: