How to Read Chinese Paintings

How to Read Chinese Paintings

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  • Author: Maxwell K. Hearn
  • Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
  • ISBN: 1588392813
  • Category : Art
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 185

"Together the text and illustrations gradually reveal many of the major themes and characteristics of Chinese painting. To "read" these works is to enter a dialogue with the past. Slowly perusing a scroll or album, one shares an intimate experience that has been repeated over the centuries. And it is through such readings that meaning is gradually revealed."--BOOK JACKET.


Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting

Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting

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  • Author: Richard M. Barnhart
  • Publisher: Yale University Press
  • ISBN: 0300094477
  • Category : Art
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 422

Written by a team of eminent international scholars, this book is the first to recount the history of Chinese painting over a span of some 3000 years.


The Art Book of Chinese Paintings

The Art Book of Chinese Paintings

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  • Author: Ming Deng
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN:
  • Category : Painting, Chinese
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 450

An introduction to a millennium's worth of Chinese paintings features 400 classical works by more than 240 artists that represent their different historical periods, in a volume that offers insight into how Chinese art uniquely reflects cultural perspectives and the natural world.


Chinese Painting

Chinese Painting

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  • Author: Mario Bussagli
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN:
  • Category : Painting, Chinese
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 168

From earliest times the delicate precision of Chinese painting has captivated Western art lovers. The sophisticated techniques, the evident love of nature and the glimpses of a quiet civilised life all add to the enchantment. This book begins with the quick sketch-like painting from the Lo-Yang tombs, dating from the 3rd century, and continues with the closely observed T'ang paintings of people, not only Emperors and court dignitaries, but also peasants and grooms with the celebrated T'ang horses. Sung painters produced some of the most powerful landscapes in Chinese art, with their strangely shaped mountains looming menacingly up through the mists, and with man, absorbed in fishing or in meditation, dwarfed by the immensity of his environment. Nautre always present in Chinese art, now preoccupied painters almost to the exclusion of all else, and the studies of trees, particularly bamboo and pines, set in mountainous river landscapes are superb. Bussagli takes the account right up to the 19th and 20th centuries, a period seldom covered in books on Chinese painting. -- Book jacket.


Beyond Representation

Beyond Representation

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  • Author: Wen Fong
  • Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
  • ISBN: 0300057016
  • Category : Calligraphy, Chinese
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 571

Beyond Representation surveys Chinese painting and calligraphy from the eighth to the fourteenth century, a period during which Chinese society and artistic expression underwent profound changes. A fourteenth-century Yuan dynasty (1279 - 1368) literati landscape painting presents a world that is totally different from that portrayed in the monumental landscape images of the early Sung dynasty (960 - 1279). To chronicle and explain the evolution from formal representation to self-expression is the purpose of this book. Wen C. Fong, one of the world's most eminent scholars of Chinese art, takes the reader through this evolution, drawing on the outstanding collection of Chinese painting and calligraphy in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Focusing on 118 works, each illustrated in full color, the book significantly augments the standard canon of images used to describe the period, enhancing our sense of the richness and complexity of artistic expression during this six-hundred-year era.


Chinese Painting and Its Audiences

Chinese Painting and Its Audiences

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  • Author: Craig Clunas
  • Publisher: Princeton University Press
  • ISBN: 0691171939
  • Category : Art
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 304

What is Chinese painting? When did it begin? And what are the different associations of this term in China and the West? In Chinese Painting and Its Audiences, which is based on the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts given at the National Gallery of Art, leading art historian Craig Clunas draws from a wealth of artistic masterpieces and lesser-known pictures, some of them discussed here in English for the first time, to show how Chinese painting has been understood by a range of audiences over five centuries, from the Ming Dynasty to today. Richly illustrated, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences demonstrates that viewers in China and beyond have irrevocably shaped this great artistic tradition. Arguing that audiences within China were crucially important to the evolution of Chinese painting, Clunas considers how Chinese artists have imagined the reception of their own work. By examining paintings that depict people looking at paintings, he introduces readers to ideal types of viewers: the scholar, the gentleman, the merchant, the nation, and the people. In discussing the changing audiences for Chinese art, Clunas emphasizes that the diversity and quantity of images in Chinese culture make it impossible to generalize definitively about what constitutes Chinese painting. Exploring the complex relationships between works of art and those who look at them, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences sheds new light on how the concept of Chinese painting has been formed and reformed over hundreds of years.


Empty and Full

Empty and Full

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  • Author: François Cheng
  • Publisher: Shambhala Publications
  • ISBN:
  • Category : Art
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 204

Chinese painting might be called "philosophy in action", for it is one of the highest expressions of Chinese spirituality. Both a medium for contemplation leading to self-transcendence and a microcosm embodying universal principles and primal forces, it is a means for making manifest the Chinese worldview. At the heart of this worldview is the notion of emptiness, the dynamic principle of transformation. Only through emptiness can things attain their full measure and human beings approach the universe at the level of totality. Focusing on the principle of emptiness, Francois Cheng uses semiotic analysis and textual explication to reveal the key themes and structures of Chinese aesthetics in the practice of pictorial art. Among the many Chinese writers, poets, and artists whose writings are quoted, he gives special emphasis to a great Ch'ing dynasty theoretician and painter, Shih-t'ao. Twenty-seven reproductions of the words of Shih-t'ao and other masters illustrate the interpretive commentary.


Chinese Painting Style

Chinese Painting Style

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  • Author: Jerome Silbergeld
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN: 9780295959214
  • Category : Art
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 68

Westerners seeking to appreciate and understand Chinese art have long felt the need of a fundamental book that explains both the technical means used by Chinese artists and the traditional stylistic modes of artistic expression. In Chinese Painting Style Jerome Silbergeld addresses this need, beginning with a discussion of basic materials and methods and continuing with in-depth studies of the complex paintings created by these methods. No other work so thoroughly or systematically describes the Chinese artistic processes, ranging from the distinctively Chinese manner of handling the brush to the blending of brushlines, wash, color, and texture into a painted composition. The final chapters examine Chinese composition in terms of naturalistic representation and of abstract expression. Throughout the book, artistic problems are set against a background of Chinese history, ideas, and geography. The illustrations include drawings that reveal the principles of Chinese brushwork, together with a broad range of Chinese paintings and calligraphy. A unique feature is the precise coding of text and illustrations, by which the reader is invited to inspect the specific turn of the brush or adjustment of composition by which the artist achieves his effects. Chinese Painting Style provides a penetrating look into the formal basis of this age-old art, and one that will be useful and engaging both to the general reader and to the serious student.


Illustrated Guide to 50 Masterpieces of Chinese Paintings

Illustrated Guide to 50 Masterpieces of Chinese Paintings

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  • Author: Kunfeng Huang
  • Publisher: Shanghai Press
  • ISBN: 1938368711
  • Category : Art
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 409

Over thousands of years, the art of Chinese painting has evolved, while also staying loyal to its traditional roots. Despite various schools of thought, styles and techniques, three primary categories have emerged across the discipline: landscape, figure and bird-and-flower. Using fine ink and water brush strokes on paper or silk, Chinese artists have developed a unique style—one that's famous throughout the world.This book highlights 50 Chinese paintings, pulled from museum collections in China and around the world, including British Museum (London), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas), Osaka City Museum of Art (Osaka), Palace Museum (Beijing), Palace Museum (Taibei) and Shanghai Museum. The paintings shown are representative of the categories, historical periods and styles of this artistic tradition.Detailed professional interpretations and notes allow readers to learn more about the pieces themselves, the artists and the context in which they were created. Plus, photo enlargements of key details get readers up close to these masterpieces.As one of the world's oldest continuous art forms, Chinese painting has a truly special history. This comprehensive guide allows modern readers to travel through time, experiencing important moments in Chinese history and society through beautiful pieces of artwork.


The Double Screen

The Double Screen

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  • Author: Wu Hung
  • Publisher: Reaktion Books
  • ISBN: 1861898428
  • Category : Art
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 298

In the first exploration of Chinese paintings as both material products and pictorial representations, The Double Screen shows how the collaboration and tension between material form and image gives life to a painting. A Chinese painting is often reduced to the image it bears; its material form is dismissed; its intimate connection with social activities and cultural conventions neglected. A screen occupies a space and divides it, supplies an ideal surface for painting, and has been a favorite pictorial image in Chinese art since antiquity. Wu Hung undertakes a comprehensive analysis of the screen, which can be an object, an art medium, a pictorial motif, or all three at once. With its diverse roles, the screen has provided Chinese painters with endless opportunities to reinvent their art. The Double Screen provides a powerful non-Western perspective on issues from portraiture and pictorial narrative to voyeurism, masquerade, and political rhetoric. It will be invaluable to anyone interested in the history of art and Asian studies.