When a Kindle Won’t Do: The Folio Society’s New Asia Volumes
It’s always been a pleasure to handle a Folio Society book, and having three of them at one time, all on Asian themes, was even better.
The Branches Are Messy and Overflowing (excerpt from “The Art of Wu Changshi”)
Wu Changshi 吳昌碩 was an extraordinary artist and a major force in late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chinese art. A true literatus in a changing cultural landscape, he combined the traditional scholarly arts with popular subject matter in a manner that would revolutionize painting. The following series of “views” represent an accumulation of forays into an…
“The Phoenix Years: Art, resistance and the making of modern China” by Madeleine O’Dea
A few years ago, President Xi Jinping gave a speech which offered his views on the role art should play in Chinese life.
“In the Footsteps of George Chinnery”
Knowingly or not, anyone who has spent much time at all on what used to be called the “China Coast” will surely have come across the paintings of the George Chinnery, an English artist active in Macau in the second quarter of the 19th century. Whatever profile Chinnery may have in the broader painterly pantheon,…
“Southeast Asia in Ruins” by Sarah Tiffin
If you were to visit the British Museum and take a quick look at HC Cornelius’s View of the ruins of a Bramin temple at Brambanang, you might surmise that it is an exquisite piece of landscape art, depicting a typical rural scene in early 19th-century Java.
Early Photographs of Hong Kong at Wattis Fine Art
A photograph captures an instant frozen in time; old photographs therefore take on a higher significance precisely as a record of the past. Photography was born roughly at the same time that Hong Kong entered world history in the early 1840s; the emerging British colony soon attracted photographers of international repute on their first trips…
“Chinese Porcelain in Habsburg Spain” by Cinta Krahe
Here at last a book to unearth the untold story of Chinese porcelain in Spain at the time when both countries first started trading. Early relations between China and Spain remains an understudied subject, and the glaring absence of a monograph on Chinese porcelain in Spain has finally been redressed with the magisterial Chinese Porcelain…
“Half the Sky” by Luise Guest
Luise Guest’s Half the Sky is a welcome addition to works on Chinese contemporary art. Amid all the froth of the Chinese art scene, Guest focuses solely on female artists, long overlooked and under-studied, presenting the work and thoughts of some thirty artists.
“A Career of Japan: Baron Raimund von Stillfried and Early Yokohama Photography” by Luke Gartlan
If you turn to page 105 in this book you will see two extraordinary figures standing and facing each other in a colored albumen print from 1872. They both have bare feet; one wears a light-blue three-quarter length robe, rather like an elegant silk dressing-gown, and the other a similar one of a darker color, with…
“The China Collectors” by Karl E Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac
A rt has been central to China’s long history and to her core spiritual and intellectual values. However, much of that heritage has either been destroyed or it is now kept outside the country. Most of the onslaught has long been self-inflicted, deliberately aimed at China’s own cultural legacy, from the Tang dynasty’s iconoclastic reaction…
