• Contents Acknowledgments List of Figures Abbreviations Introduction
• 1 Gendered Subjectivity and Representing Interiority Subjectivity and Authorship Pictorial Representations of Inner Feelings Courtly and Literati Audiences: Evidence from Commentaries
• 2 Political Interpretations of Desire Handscrolls of Goddess of the Luo River The Beijing Handscroll Night Revels of Han Xizai
• 3 Male Audience and Authorship: Projecting Desire and Longing onto the Female Figure Huizong's Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk Mou Yi's Pounding Cloth
• 4 The Female Audience: Modeling Idealized Femininity Women and Fan Paintings Ladies Adorning Their Hair with Flowers: A Bed-Screen? Conclusion: Interiority and the Value of Connection Works Cited Index.
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In Song Dynasty Figures of Longing and Desire, Lara Blanchard analyzes images of women in painting and poetry of China's middle imperial period, focusing on works that represent female figures as preoccupied with romance. She discusses examples of visual and literary culture in regard to their authorship and audience, examining the role of interiority in constructions of gender, exploring the rhetorical functions of romantic images, and considering connections between subjectivity and representation. The paintings in particular have sometimes been interpreted as simple representations of the daily lives of women, or as straightforward artifacts of heteroerotic desire; Blanchard proposes that such works could additionally be interpreted as political allegories, representations of the artist's or patron's interiorities, or models of idealized femininity.
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Ink landscape painting is a distinctive feature of the Northern Song, and painters of this era produced some of the most celebrated artworks in Chinese history. The Efficacious Landscape" addresses how landmark works of this pivotal period first came to be identified as potent symbols of imperial authority and later became objects through which exiled scholars expressed disaffection and dissent. In fulfilling these diverse roles, landscape demonstrated its efficacy in communicating through embodiment and in transcending the limitations of the concrete. Building on decades of monographic writings on Song painting, this carefully researched study presents a syncretic vision of how ink landscape evolved within the eleventh-century court community of artists, scholars, and aristocrats. Detailed visual analyses of surviving works and new insight about key landscapes by the court painter Guo Xi support the perspective put forward here and introduce original methodologies for interpreting painting as an integral element of political and cultural history. By focusing on the efforts of emperors, empresses, and eunuchs to cultivate ink landscape and its iconography, this investigation also tackles the social and class dichotomies that have long defined and frustrated existing scholarship on this period s paintings, highlighting instead the interconnectedness of painting practice s elite modalities.".
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• Introduction: Promoting palindromes
• Empress Liu and sage mother worship
• Imperial women and the art of writing
• Empress Wu and the aesthetics of worthiness
• Empress Yang and the art of expression
• Epilogue. The way of water.

"Empresses, Art, and Agency in Song Dynasty China" is the first book in any language devoted to the art of imperial women in China. Utilizing a wide range of historical sources and materials, this groundbreaking, interdisciplinary study pieces together a lost history of female creativity by focusing on the critical role emperors' wives played as patrons, collectors, taste-makers, and artists during the three-century Song dynasty (960-1279), an era noted for spectacular cultural achievements. The Song led China to unrivalled intellectual, socio-economic, scientific, and urban advances. A flourishing printing culture helped spur a dramatic expansion of literacy that also benefited women, whose talent in learning was often paired with virtue and was exemplified by the Song imperial women. Paralleling these developments was an unprecedented level of imperial patronage of the fine arts, including painting and calligraphy. However, while individual emperors such as Huizong (r. 1100-1125) have long been recognized for their importance in this arena, the role played by imperial women has remained largely hidden, subject in part to the biases of Chinese historiography. Drawing against the backdrop of their formidable presence in court politics, Hui-shu Lee recounts and reveals the stories of their lives and art. Lee focuses on such Song empresses as Liu, Wu, and Yang Meizi, artists and powerbrokers whose skill and influence helped shape the development of temple construction, sculpture, painting, and many other aspects of arts and culture. Acting in the shadow of the notorious female emperor Wu Zetian of the Tang dynasty, early Song imperial women began to define themselves through images and modes of expression that purposely concealed their power. In the process, they helped forge an effective and lasting model of female agency in China. In her exploration of Song imperial arts, Lee looks at ghost-writing, art collecting, didactic art, and the use of calligraphy and painting as gendered modes of expression. She draws on a number of disciplines, including art history, literature, history, and gender studies, to provide a unique account of the vital role of empresses in shaping Song art and culture. In addition to benefiting researchers in Chinese history, art history, and women's studies, this book will be of interest to scholars in other fields of history as well as to general readers. Hui-shu Lee is associate professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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By the end of the sixth century CE, both the royal courts and the educated elite in China were collecting works of art, particularly scrolls of calligraphy and paintings done by known artists. By the time of Emperor Huizong (1082-1135) of the Song dynasty (960-1279), both scholars and the imperial court were cataloguing their collections and also collecting ancient bronzes and rubbings of ancient inscriptions. The catalogues of Huizong's painting, calligraphy, and antiquities collections list over 9,000 items, and the tiny fraction of the listed items that survive today are all important works, among the masterpieces of early Chinese art.Patricia Ebrey's study of Huizong's collections places them in both political and art historical context. The acts of adding to and cataloguing the imperial collections were political ones, among the strategies that the Song court used to demonstrate its patronage of the culture of the brush, and they need to be seen in the context of contemporary political divisions and controversies. At the same time, court intervention in the art market was both influenced by, and had an impact on, the production, circulation, and imagination of art outside the court."Accumulating Culture" provides a rich context for interpreting the three book-length catalogues of Huizong's collection and specific objects that have survived. It contributes to a rethinking of the cultural side of Chinese imperial rule and of the court as a patron of scholars and the arts, neither glorifying Huizong as a man of the arts nor castigating him as a megalomaniac, but rather taking a hardheaded look at the political and cultural ramifications of collecting and the reasons for choices made by Huizong and his curators.The reader is offered glimpses of the magnificence of the collections he formed and the disparate fates of the objects after they were seized as booty by the Jurchen invaders in 1127. The heart of the book examines in detail the primary fields of collecting - antiquities, calligraphy, and painting. Chapters devoted to each of these use Huizong's catalogues to reconstruct what was in his collection and to probe choices made by the cataloguers. The acts of inclusion, exclusion, and sequencing that they performed allowed them to influence how people thought of the collection, and to attempt to promote or demote particular artists and styles.This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Chinese art history, social history, and culture, as well as art collectors. Patricia Buckley Ebrey is professor of history at the University of Washington and author of "The Cambridge Illustrated History of China" and "The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period".
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Huizong was an exceptional emperor who lived through momentous times. A man of many talents, he wrote poetry and created his own distinctive calligraphy style; collected paintings, calligraphies and antiquities on a large scale; promoted Daoism; and involved himself in the training of court artists, the layout of gardens, and reforms of music and medicine. The quarter century when Huizong ruled is just as fascinating. The greatly enlarged scholar-official class had come into its own but was deeply divided by factional strife. The long struggle between the Chinese state and its northern neighbours entered a new phase when Song proved unable to defend itself against the newly emergent Jurchen state of Jin. Huizong and thousands of members of his family and court were taken captive, and the Song dynasty had to recreate itself in the South.
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Presents artefacts from some of the most important archaeological discoveries, bringing to life one of China's forgotten dynasties and its unique culture - the Empire of Liao.
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• The origins of Chinese architecture / Liu Xujie
• The Qin and Han dynasties / Liu Xujie
• The Three Kingdoms, western and eastern Jin, and northern and southern dynasties / Fu Xinian
• The Sui, Tang, and Five Dynasties / Fu Xinian
• The Liao, Song, Xi Xia, and Jin dynasties / Guo Daiheng
• The Yuan and Ming dynasties / Pan Giuxi
• The Qing dynasty / Sun Dazhang.

• 1. Prehistoric Roots: Late Neolithic Cultures.
• 2. The Early Bronze Age: Shang and Western Zhou.
• 3. The Late Bronze Age: Eastern Zhou.
• 4. The First Empires: Qin and Han.
• 5. Age of Dharma: The Period of Division.
• 6. A New Imperial State: Sui and Tang.
• 7. Technologies and Cultures of the Song.
• 8. Official, Personal, and Urban Arts of the Yuan to Middle Ming.
• 9. Art Systems and Circulations: Late Ming to Middle Qing.
• 10. Identity and Community in 19th- and 20th Century Chinese Art.
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A generously illustrated introduction to 7,000 years of Chinese art - from Neolithic pottery and jade to contemporary video, installation and performance media. By placing the arts in context, the authors introduce a dynamic and continually evolving tradition, rather than a sequence of isolated museum masterpieces. Although chronological in sequence, it introduces relevant themes for each era that will deepen understanding of, and appreciation for, what the authors describe as 'the most abundantly productive, continuous artistic culture in the history of the world.'.
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For courses in Far Eastern Art and survey courses in Chinese Art History.This text discusses Chinese art within a variety of contexts--such as archaeological, cultural, historical, social, and ritual/religious. Organized both chronologically and thematically, it covers a full historical span--from the Neolithic era to contemporary art, and includes a wide range of media and settings for art--from elite to popular. An emphasis on the dynamic processes that effect the history of Chinese art: social, economic, political competition, urbanization, markets and tastes, and quests for cultural authority, allows specific works of art to be discussed in extensive detail, while setting them within larger explanatory narratives.
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This exhibition reevaluates Southern Song art in the context of the geography, cultural traditions and historical references of West Lake in Hangzhou. The Southern Song (1127 - 1279) capital of Lin'an, located near beautiful West Lake, was the center of a dynasty that looked largely inward. In this regard, the story of Southern Song art can be presented in a manner that is site-specific. The exhibition includes over 50 paintings (album leaves, hanging scrolls and fan paintings) and lustrous ceramics from premier collections, from the U.S. and abroad, and utilizes maps and literary accounts to further emphasize the influence of place in Southern Song art from a period known to many as one of the most 'exquisite moments' in art history.
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Presents works excavated from 2 sets of tombs in northern China from the 9th to 12th centuries. Objects such as fine ceramic pots and bowls, tea services and furniture are shown, as well as reproductions of the tomb wall murals, to present a story of daily life.
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Throughout the history of imperial China, the educated elite used various means to criticise government policies and actions. During the Song dynasty (960-1278), some members of this elite found an elegant and subtle means of dissent: landscape painting. By examining literary archetypes, the titles of paintings, contemporary inscriptions, and the historical context, Alfreda Murck shows that certain paintings expressed strong political opinions - some transparent, other deliberately concealed. She argues that the coding of messages in seemingly innocuous paintings was an important factor in the growing respect for painting among the educated elite and that the capacity of painting's systems of reference to allow scholars to express dissent with impunity contributed to the art's vitality and longevity.
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• Introductory essays. Reading Chinese calligraphy / Robert E. Harrist, Jr. Chinese calligraphy : theory and history / Wen C. Fong
• Catalogue
• Essays. Texts of Taoism and Buddhism and the power of calligraphic style / Amy McNair. A letter from Wang Hsi-chih and the culture of Chinese calligraphy / Robert E. Harrist, Jr. Opposite paths to originality : Huang T'ing-chien and Mi Fu / Jay Xu. The two perfections : reading poetry and calligraphy / Robert E. Harrist, Jr. A quest for the imperishable : Chao Meng-fu's calligraphy for stele inscriptions / Zhixin Sun. Ming Dynasty Soochow and the golden age of literati culture / Chuan-hsing Ho. The aesthetics of the unusual and the strange in seventeenth-century calligraphy / Dora C.Y. Ching. Calligraphic couplets as manifestations of deities and markers of buildings / Cary Y. Liu. Chinese letters : private words made public / Qianshen Bai.

• Acknowledgments Ch. 1 The Face behind the Fan: Li Gonglin and Northern Song Painting Ch. 2 A Walk through the Longmian Mountains Ch. 3 The Transformed Landscape: Place and Persona in Northern Song Gardens Ch. 4 Evoking the Past: Memories of Wang Wei and Lu Hong Ch. 5 Mountain Villa and the Languages of Landscape in Eleventh-Century China Ch. 6 Conclusion: Painting and Private Life Appendix The Extant Copies of Mountain Villa Notes Bibliography Glossary of Chinese Characters Index Illustrations.
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In the eleventh century, the focus of Chinese painting shifted dramatically. The subject matter of most earlier works of art was drawn from a broadly shared heritage of political, religious, and literary themes. Late in the century, however, a group of scholar-artists began to make paintings that reflected the private experiences of their own lives. Robert Harrist argues here that no work illuminates this development more vividly than Mountain Villa, a handscroll by the renowned artist Li Gonglin (ca. 1041-1106). Through a detailed reading of the painting and an analysis of its place in the visual culture of Li's time, the author offers a new explanation for the emergence of autobiographic content in Chinese art. Harrist proposes that the subject of Li's painting - his garden in the Longmian Mountains - was itself a form of self-representation, since a garden was then considered a reflection of its owner's character and values. He demonstrates also that Li's turn toward the imagery of private life was inspired by the conventions of Chinese lyric poetry, in which poets recorded and responded to the experiences of their lives. The book draws the reader into the artistic, scholarly, and political world of Li Gonglin and shows the profound influence of Buddhism on Chinese painting and poetry. It offers important insights not just into Chinese art, but also into Chinese literature and intellectual history.
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Mi Fu was a prominent calligrapher in 11th-century China. This analysis of his work considers content and style, and examines his calligraphy within the framework of the artist's life, the Northern Song culture in which he lived and the literati theory of art he helped to formulate.
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