“Under the Wave Off Kanagawa”, popularly known as “The Great Wave”, is without a doubt the most celebrated Japanese woodblock print. It is also the most recognised work of Japanese art tout court. Ask anyone with an interest in the genre and they will tell you that it was made by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) which,…
Can a painting outlive its authenticity? For art lovers and collectors, an artwork’s value is often inseparable from its status as a singular object. This is why the authenticity of the Mona Lisa is of paramount importance to the Louvre Museum. The painting’s “value” comes not just from its visual qualities, but it carries with it the…
East Asia’s Yuan Empire (1271–1368), led by the nomadic Mongol people and Qubilai Khan (1215–1294), was marked by cross-cultural exchange and significant developments in trade, technology, and infrastructure. The Mongol visual culture, however, has often been ignored or dismissed as insignificant in the operations of the Mongols’ own empire. The Woven Image: The Making of…
It normally makes a great difference to art “history” if a given object is authentic or fabricated. And yet, the fabrication of any given object, to say nothing of a class of objects, carries within its own history: one not always of fraud, but also of gatekeeping on the one hand and exploitation on the…
In London’s Victoria and Albert Museum a 16th-century Iranian carpet reigns over the Islamic collection and mesmerizes visitors. In Threads of Empire, Dorothy Armstrong writes, “The carpet transports us away from South Kensington to wherever our personal Arabian Nights dreams are located.” While the beauty of the pile side of her 12 rugs entrances her,…
The art historian Ernst Gombrich once observed that in Chinese landscape painting, the aim is not to reproduce the appearance of things, but to convey the rhythm and spirit of nature. Among genres of traditional Chinese art, landscape painting is widely regarded as a central tradition and admired for its qualities beyond the aesthetics, with…
Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750-1850 is the accompanying volume to an eponymous exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art which places painters, local and foreign, working in India and China in the context of the commercial and colonial operations of the East India Company.
Jainism, an older contemporary of Buddhism, is rooted in the ideals of austerity. While Buddhism spread outside India, very little is known about Jainism worldwide. Similarly, in terms of art, it is subsumed within the larger Hindu and Buddhist traditions of rock-cut architecture. In terms of painting, the Kalpasutra and Uttaradhyaynasutra are two texts thought…
The Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, never one to shrink from a challenge, visited Gobustan in Azerbaijan for two decades to prove his theory that the ancestors of today’s Scandinavians left behind the mysterious rock carvings near Baku. Uncanny similarities between petroglyphs showing the long, oared boats of Caspian seafarers and those of the Vikings, and…
Even the idlest stroller will be awestruck by the beauty of Cairo’s City of the Dead. Yet this gem of 14th and 15th century architecture, a Unesco World Heritage site, leaves the visitor wondering about the sultans, beys and princesses for whom these elaborate monuments were built. Stones can tell stories, but objects bring the…
Chinese bronzes produced from the latter part of the Song dynasty (12th-13th century) through the end of the Qing dynasty (early 20th century) have long been underappreciated and under-researched. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s fine catalogue, Recasting the Past: The Art of Chinese Bronzes, 1100-1900 (accompanying the exhibition of the same name running through September…
Bali 1952: Through the Lens of Liu Kang documents a seven-week trip to Java and Bali in 1952 by four China-born and Shanghai-trained Singapore artists—Chen Wen Hsi, Chen Chong Swee, Cheong Soo Pieng and Liu Kang—to sketch and paint tropical beauty.
Ancient India is a new publication and exhibition by the British Museum that explores the shared origins of Hindu, Buddhist and Jain devotional art in figurative imagery of India’s ancient nature spirits. These three of the world’s major religions originated in India and gradually spread to other regions of the world. Between 200 BCE and…
In its 1911 inaugural issue, the Women’s Eastern Times (Funü shibao) printed a composite photograph of embroiderer Shen Shou (1874–1921) together with her work—an embroidered portrait of the Italian queen Elena of Montenegro (1871–1952). A caption slip pasted onto the embroidery states: “Commendation from the Empress Dowager to bestow [upon her] the character ‘Shou’ [longevity]…
Japanese painters, printmakers, and sculptors who produced artwork in support of Tokyo’s war efforts in the period between 1931 and 1945, had to pivot as they continued their careers in the shadow of empire during the seven-year US occupation occupation, which began with Japan’s defeat in 1945 and ended in 1952 under a Cold War…