Zhao Mengfu

Zhao Mengfu has enormous significance for Chinese art history. This work presents a new, synthetic portrait of the artist's development from the 1280s to his death in 1322, and evaluates his pivotal role in the social-political context in Yuan China as well as the development of the artist's self-consciousness. Shane McCausland's study features detailed interpretations of pictorial forms in light of historical changes, and close readings of critical colophons, many of whic are appended to artworks but neglected as visual sources. These readings are meant to stimulate visual analysis of the oeuvre as well as debate about the use of Tang (618-907) and other period modes as models for the 'Yuan renaissance.' The book challenges stereotypes portraying Zhao Mengfu as a traitor or careerist. The historical background of dynastic change and Mongol rule is treated in a revisionist manner that aims to contextualize the traditional Chinese hostility towards Zhao Mengfu as a Yuan scholar-official. The concern here is for his development, in the context of Mongol rule, as a Chinese scholar-artist. This book will be a must for scholars, curators, and other specialists in Chinese painting and calligraphy, especially those focusing on Yuan dynasty and literati painting. Shane McCauslandis a lecturer in the history of Chinese art in the Department of Art and Archaeology at SOAS, University of London.

The works of Chinese painter and calligrapher Zhao Mengfu 赵孟頫 (1254-1322). Composite 4 Edition.

The Chinese Chan (jap. Zen) abbot Zhongfeng Mingben of the Yuan Dynasty forged a synthesis of buddhist sutra writing and draft-cursive (zhang cao) script in his calligraphy. This highly idiosyncratic, new style of calligraphy prompted innovative trends in Ming Dynasty China and transmitted current Chinese artistic developments to Japan where it had a major impact on Zen- and tea circles.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Sept. 28, 2010-Jan. 2, 2011.

"Together the text and illustrations gradually reveal many of the major themes and characteristics of Chinese painting. To "read" these works is to enter a dialogue with the past. Slowly perusing a scroll or album, one shares an intimate experience that has been repeated over the centuries. And it is through such readings that meaning is gradually revealed."--BOOK JACKET.

Written by a team of eminent international scholars, this book is the first to recount the history of Chinese painting over a span of some 3000 years.

A book without words, recounting a day in the life of an office worker, told completely in the symbols, icons, and logos of modern life. Twenty years ago I made Book from the Sky, a book of illegible Chinese characters that no one could read. Now I have created Book from the Ground, a book that anyone can read. —Xu Bing Following his classic work Book from the Sky, the Chinese artist Xu Bing presents a new graphic novel—one composed entirely of symbols and icons that are universally understood. Xu Bing spent seven years gathering materials, experimenting, revising, and arranging thousands of pictograms to construct the narrative of Book from the Ground. The result is a readable story without words, an account of twenty-four hours in the life of “Mr. Black,” a typical urban white-collar worker. Our protagonist's day begins with wake-up calls from a nearby bird and his bedside alarm clock; it continues through tooth-brushing, coffee-making, TV-watching, and cat-feeding. He commutes to his job on the subway, works in his office, ponders various fast-food options for lunch, waits in line for the bathroom, daydreams, sends flowers, socializes after work, goes home, kills a mosquito, goes to bed, sleeps, and gets up the next morning to do it all over again. His day is recounted with meticulous and intimate detail, and reads like a postmodern, post-textual riff on James Joyce's account of Bloom's peregrinations in Ulysses. But Xu Bing's narrative, using an exclusively visual language, could be published anywhere, without translation or explication; anyone with experience in contemporary life—anyone who has internalized the icons and logos of modernity, from smiley faces to transit maps to menus—can understand it.

Since the first millennium BCE, nomads of the Eurasian steppe have played a key role in world history and the development of adjacent sedentary regions, especially China, India, the Middle East, and Eastern and Central Europe. Although their more settled neighbors often saw them as an ongoing threat and imminent danger—“barbarians,” in fact—their impact on sedentary cultures was far more complex than the raiding, pillaging, and devastation with which they have long been associated in the popular imagination. The nomads were also facilitators and catalysts of social, demographic, economic, and cultural change, and nomadic culture had a significant influence on that of sedentary Eurasian civilizations, especially in cases when the nomads conquered and ruled over them. Not simply passive conveyors of ideas, beliefs, technologies, and physical artifacts, nomads were frequently active contributors to the process of cultural exchange and change. Their active choices and initiatives helped set the cultural and intellectual agenda of the lands they ruled and beyond. This volume brings together a distinguished group of scholars from different disciplines and cultural specializations to explore how nomads played the role of “agents of cultural change.” The beginning chapters examine this phenomenon in both east and west Asia in ancient and early medieval times, while the bulk of the book is devoted to the far flung Mongol empire of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This comparative approach, encompassing both a lengthy time span and a vast region, enables a clearer understanding of the key role that Eurasian pastoral nomads played in the history of the Old World. It conveys a sense of the complex and engaging cultural dynamic that existed between nomads and their agricultural and urban neighbors, and highlights the non-military impact of nomadic culture on Eurasian history. Nomads as Agents of Cultural Change illuminates and complicates nomadic roles as active promoters of cultural exchange within a vast and varied region. It makes available important original scholarship on the new turn in the study of the Mongol empire and on relations between the nomadic and sedentary worlds.