A sweeping look at Chinese art across the millennia that upends traditional perspectives and offers new pathways for art history Throughout Chinese history, dynastic time—the organization of history through the lens of successive dynasties—has been the dominant mode of narrating the story of Chinese art, even though there has been little examination of this concept in discourse and practice until now. Chinese Art and Dynastic Time uncovers how the development of Chinese art was described in its original cultural, sociopolitical, and artistic contexts, and how these narratives were interwoven with contemporaneous artistic creation. In doing so, leading art historian Wu Hung opens up new pathways for the consideration of not only Chinese art, but also the whole of art history. Wu Hung brings together ten case studies, ranging from the third millennium BCE to the early twentieth century CE, and spanning ritual and religious art, painting, sculpture, the built environment, and popular art in order to examine the deep-rooted patterns in the historical conceptualization of Chinese art. Elucidating the changing notions of dynastic time in various contexts, he also challenges the preoccupation with this concept as the default mode in art historical writing. This critical investigation of dynastic time thus constitutes an essential foundation to pursue new narrative and interpretative frameworks in thinking about art history. Remarkable for the sweep and scope of its arguments and lucid style, Chinese Art and Dynastic Time probes the roots of the collective imagination in Chinese art and frees us from long-held perspectives on how this art should be understood. Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

"Set amid the glimmering lakes and disappearing forests of the United States in the 1830s, The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s imagines how individuals at the time experienced their lives. Part truth, part fiction, this book follows painters, poets, enslaved individuals, farmers, and artisans through various settings. Some, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nat Turner, Thomas Cole, and Edgar Allan Poe, are well-known; others are not. All are creators of private and grand designs, and makers of the worlds they inhabited. The Forest unfolds in brief stories. Each is an episode revealing a lost world of intricate relations: human beings going their own ways or crossing paths, in a place that is known to history, or is remote and unknown. For Alex Nemerov, the forest is a description of American society, as he writes, "the dense and discontinuous woods of nation, the foliating thoughts of different people, each with their separate life to lead." Nemerov's art history is at its center an experiment in writing, in how to write differently about visual culture. The Forest examines the history of the United States on a human scale, displaying the patterns of life alongside examples of paintings, prints, photographs and objects"--

A leading art historian presents a new grammar for understanding the meaning and significance of print In process and technique, printmaking is an art of physical contact. From woodcut and engraving to lithography and screenprinting, every print is the record of a contact event: the transfer of an image between surfaces, under pressure, followed by release. Contact reveals how the physical properties of print have their own poetics and politics and provides a new framework for understanding the intelligence and continuing relevance of printmaking today. The seemingly simple physics of printmaking brings with it an array of metamorphoses that give expression to many of the social and conceptual concerns at the heart of modern and contemporary art. Exploring transformations such as reversal, separation, and interference, Jennifer Roberts explores these dynamics in the work of Christiane Baumgartner, David Hammons, Edgar Heap of Birds, Jasper Johns, Corita Kent, Glenn Ligon, Julie Mehretu, Robert Rauschenberg, and many other leading artists who work at the edge of the medium and beyond. Focusing on the material and spatial transformations of the printmaking process rather than its reproducibility, this beautifully illustrated book explores the connections between print, painting, and sculpture, but also between the fine arts, industrial arts, decorative arts, and domestic arts. Throughout, Roberts asks what artists are learning from print, and what we, in turn, can learn from them. Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington

China can boast a history of art lasting 5,000 years and embracing a huge diversity of images and objects - jade tablets, painted silk handscrolls and fans, ink and lacquer painting, porcelain-ware, sculptures, and calligraphy. They range in scale from the vast 'terracotta army' with its 7,000or so life-size figures, to the exquisitely delicate writing of fourth-century masters such as Wang Xizhin and his teacher, 'Lady Wei'. But this rich tradition has not, until now, been fully appreciated in the West where scholars have focused their attention on sculpture, downplaying art more highlyprized by the Chinese themselves such as calligraphy. Art in China marks a breakthrough in the study of the subject. Drawing on recent innovative scholarship and on newly-accessible studies in China itself Craig Clunas surveys the full spectrum of the visual arts in China. He ranges from the Neolithic period to the art scene of the 1980s and 1990s,examining art in a variety of contexts as it has been designed for tombs, commissioned by rulers, displayed in temples, created for the men and women of the educated ilite, and bought and sold in the marketplace. Many of the objects illustrated in this book have previously been known only to a fewspecialists, and will be totally new to a general audience.

Boundary making, a crucial element in human cultural creativity, links these essays exploring Chinese art and society. Traversing time and cultural category, individual expression and social construct, the authors demonstrate how a 'boundary' may exist simultaneously as barrier, threshold and interface. The essays range from the creation of the first political and bureaucratic boundaries in early China, to the dismantling of discursive boundaries in the post-Mao era. Spanning diverse subjects, moving between ancient funerary art and the tension between self and image in modern Peking Opera, they deftly explore the psychodynamics of Chinese society. All the authors in this book are established Sinologists. Boundaries in China will be stimulating reading for anyone interested to see how the seemingly tangential or peripheral can turn out to be of central concern in non-Western (and perhaps also Western) art and culture.

This book provides a valuable review of the disciplines of organizational and management history, illuminating the interconnectedness of these disciplines, identifying gaps in the literature, and sketching a model for a unified field of research and study. This co-authored study is a long-awaited theoretical re-evaluation of organizational and management history. The authors explore the disciplinary advantages of a joint approach to these related fields, noting opportunities for future scholarship, from the wider range of industries and case types to the richer theoretical toolbox. Within this framework, the book investigates interdisciplinary methodologies and surveys and analyzes the most promising of the newest theoretical lenses and empirical approaches in the field. The authors address complex issues from a metacritical perspective, from the emergent theorization of time in the context of organizational identity to the conundrum of case selection for empirical studies. Clear and thorough, the volume creates a compelling theoretical framework for future studies. New Directions in Organizational and Management History inaugurates, and sets the stage for, the new series De Gruyter Studies in Organizational and Management History.

China has an age-old zoomorphic tradition. The First Emperor was famously said to have had the heart of a tiger and a wolf. The names of foreign tribes were traditionally written with characters that included animal radicals. In modern times, the communist government frequently referred to Nationalists as “running dogs,” and President Xi Jinping, vowing to quell corruption at all levels, pledged to capture both “the tigers” and “the flies.” Splendidly illustrated with works ranging from Bronze Age vessels to twentieth-century conceptual pieces, this volume is a wide-ranging look at zoomorphic and anthropomorphic imagery in Chinese art. The contributors, leading scholars in Chinese art history and related fields, consider depictions of animals not as simple, one-for-one symbolic equivalents: they pursue in depth, in complexity, and in multiple dimensions the ways that Chinese have used animals from earliest times to the present day to represent and rhetorically stage complex ideas about the world around them, examining what this means about China, past and present. In each chapter, a specific example or theme based on real or mythic creatures is derived from religious, political, or other sources, providing the detailed and learned examination needed to understand the means by which such imagery was embedded in Chinese cultural life. Bronze Age taotie motifs, calendrical animals, zoomorphic modes in Tantric Buddhist art, Song dragons and their painters, animal rebuses, Heaven-sent auspicious horses and foreign-sent tribute giraffes, the fantastic specimens depicted in the Qing Manual of Sea Oddities, the weirdly indeterminate creatures found in the contemporary art of Huang Yong Ping—these and other notable examples reveal Chinese attitudes over time toward the animal realm, explore Chinese psychology and patterns of imagination, and explain some of the critical means and motives of Chinese visual culture. The Zoomorphic Imagination in Chinese Art and Culture will find a ready audience among East Asian art and visual culture specialists and those with an interest in literary or visual rhetoric. Contributors: Sarah Allan, Qianshen Bai, Susan Bush, Daniel Greenberg, Carmelita (Carma) Hinton, Judy Chungwa Ho, Kristina Kleutghen, Kathlyn Liscomb, Jennifer Purtle, Jerome Silbergeld, Henrik Sørensen, and Eugene Y. Wang.

Lao She remains revered as one of China's great modern writers. His life and work have been the subject of volumes of critique, analysis and study. This book covers the four years the young aspiring writer spent in London between 1924 and 1929.