During the Song dynasty (960-1278), some of China's elite found an elegant and subtle means of dissent: landscape painting. By examining literary archetypes, painting titles, contemporary inscriptions, and the historical context, Murck shows that certain paintings expressed strong political opinions--some transparent, others deliberately concealed.

In Parting the Mists, Aida Yuen Wong makes a convincing argument that the forging of a national tradition in modern China was frequently pursued in association with rather than in rejection of Japan. The focus of her book is on Japan’s integral role in the invention of "national-style painting," or guohua, in early-twentieth-century China. Guohua, referring to brush paintings on traditional formats, is often misconstrued as a residual conservatism from the dynastic age that barricaded itself within classical traditions. Wong places this art form at the forefront of cross-cultural exchange. Notable proponents of guohua (e.g., Chen Hengke, Jin Cheng, Fu Baoshi, and Gao Jianfu) are discussed in connection with Japan, where they discovered stylistic and ideological paradigms consonant with the empowering of "Asian/Oriental" cultural practices against the backdrop of encroaching westernization. Not just a "window on the West," Japan stood as an informant of China modernism in its own right. The first book in English devoted to Sino-Japanese dialogues in modern art, Parting the Mists explores the sensitive phenomenon of Japanism in the practice and theory of Chinese painting. Wong carries out a methodologically agile study that sheds light on multiple spheres: stylistic and iconographic innovations, history writing, art theory, patronage and the market, geopolitics, the creation of artists’ societies, and exhibitions. Without avoiding the dark history of Japanese imperialism, she provides a nuanced reading of Chinese views about Japan and the two countries’ convergent, and often colliding, courses of nationalism.

"This is an outstanding piece of work: timely, essential, authoritative, and original. Cahill throws light on obscure artists, emerging styles and regional traditions, unexplored aspects of cultural life, enigmatic iconographies, and questions of authorship and authenticity, leaving the reader richly informed and full of new ideas."--Susan Nelson, Indiana University "Cahill brings the vast body of 'vernacular' painting into the legitimate venue of art historical criticism, giving connoisseurs, viewers, and readers a more capacious and accurate grasp of the world of Chinese pictorial art."--Susan Mann, author of The Talented Women of the Zhang Family

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.

"How did modern Chinese painters see landscape? Did they depict nature in the same way as premodern Chinese painters? What does the artistic perception of modern Chinese painters reveal about the relationship between artists and the nation-state? Could an understanding of modern Chinese landscape painting tell us something previously unknown about art, political change, and the epistemological and sensory regime of twentieth-century China? Yi Gu tackles these questions by focusing on the rise of open-air painting in modern China. Chinese artists almost never painted outdoors until the late 1910s, when the New Culture Movement prompted them to embrace direct observation, linear perspective, and a conception of vision based on Cartesian optics. The new landscape practice brought with it unprecedented emphasis on perception and redefined artistic expertise. Central to the pursuit of open-air painting from the late 1910s right through to the early 1960s was a reinvigorated and ever-growing urgency to see suitably as a Chinese and to see the Chinese homeland correctly. Examining this long-overlooked ocular turn, Gu not only provides an innovative perspective from which to reflect on complicated interactions of the global and local in China, but also calls for rethinking the nature of visual modernity there."

Celebrity artist Shen Jiawei's history paintings are held in national museums and in public or private collections all around the world, including the Vatican. In this book, he chronicles the contexts in which his paintings were done, giving us rare insights of the national histories behind the canvas of his works.

How to design and paint your own beautiful ceramics, without the need for kiln-firing.