The title of Women across Asian Art cannot do justice to the edited volume’s rich and varied content. Ranging over 3,000 years, the book is not only about women, but also gender. It is not limited to “art”, but takes on a more wide-ranging body of material culture and its associated disciplines, including archaeology and architecture. Geographically, it spans East and South Asia and beyond, albeit skewing sinocentric.
Art history
Angie Chau’s discussion of five Chinese literary and visual artists who sojourned in Paris between (for the most part) the First and Second World War explores, in an academic way, the notion of “transposition”, a usage she has coined to describe how artists navigated the two environments—Chinese and French—they encountered and operated in. Non-academic readers might be drawn to the straightforward stories promised in the subtitle “Early Twentieth Century Sino-French Encounters”.
“Replete with symbolism,” writes Navina Najat Haider in Jali: Lattice of Divine Light in Mughal Architecture, “the Indian jali evolved to become both a technical and an aesthetic marvel in Mughal-period buildings, and eventually an international ‘Islamicate’ style of the modern age.”
“In the early summer of 1819, a British hunting party was heading through thick jungle near Aurangabad when the tiger they were tracking disappeared into the chasm of a deep ravine.” With that romantic and somewhat Indiana Jones-like opening, William Dalrymple begins his Foreword to this new and updated edition of Benoy K Behl’s classic The Ajanta Caves: Ancient Buddhist Paintings of India.
It’s amazing that art historians like Robert Hillenbrand got to study the “Great Mongol Shahnama” at all. 500 pages of Firahdosi’s epic poem, with 300 illustrations, in a manuscript whose leaves are as wide as an ordinary person’s arms. Never completed, never bound, smuggled out of Iran by corrupt dignitaries, and separated and padded out by an unsavory Belgian art dealer.
Travelers to Turkey often return with a ceramic plate or tile as a souvenir of their sojourn, many of these have designs based on or inspired by the ceramics from Iznik (the ancient Nicaea, across the Marmara from Istanbul), a major center of production between the 15th and 17th centuries, a history probably unknown to most of the buyers.
Those outside Iran are likely largely unfamiliar with the country’s art and culture of the 19th century, something easily remedied, however, by this very beautifully produced large-format book, packed with splendidly vivid color reproductions and lively analyses.