Yuan dynasty court collections of Chinese Painting, part 1

2014

In XIII-XIV centuries, Emperor Kublai Khan of the Yuan Empire provided special attention to artists, about whose work their enlightened contemporaries talk as about a "revolution" in the art of the time. In this period, culture including pictorial skill as such had not disappeared; it rather turned into a different quality, as it happened with the culture of Yuan period as a whole. The time of Mongol domination was not accompanied by a weakening of the high spiritual tension in Chinese culture: when else, as not in a period of unrest, wars and external pressure a culture suffers not only a shock, but the ultimate spiritual tension? It's more accurate to say that the Mongol time a new system of priorities turned up. For example, the Yuan period easel painting undergoing changes in the level of concentration is often really inferior to its predecessor - Sung painting, as she sometimes is inferior in this respect to its contemporary - Buddhist bronze plastic, that perhaps...

Book Review of Shane McCausland, The Mongol Century: Visual Cultures of Yuan China 1271-1368 (2015)

The English-language version of the article published in Meiyu Xuekan, December 2015. It is intended to supplement the Mandarin version.

Medieval Encounters, 2011

Medieval art refers principally to the art of Western Europe. Objects, however, complicate its chronology and geography. To begin to understand the fast, fluid, and far-reaching currents of the human transmission of European medieval art, this essay studies objects made by and/or for expatriate Europeans resident in China under Mongol rule. A unique part of Yuan visual culture, European ways of making and seeing objects existed in Sino-Mongol contexts-namely for court, merchants and the Church-like those of Europe. European ways of making and seeing objects were not wholly discrete from Sino-Mongol ways of making and seeing objects. Rather, by examining the cases of a French goldsmith active at the court of Möngke Khan (ca. 1208-1259), of tombstones made for the children of a Genoese merchant, and of pictures made by and for Franciscan missions, this essay attempts to show, in a limited way, how European objects in Yuan China spoke languages-firstly, of mimetic form; secondly, of iconography, pictorial convention, and text; and, thirdly, of materialitythat made them meaningful to local audiences, delimited spheres of expatriate European medieval visual culture, and participated in a transregional European medieval art.

Journal of Song-Yuan Studies (published 2018), 2016

Ming Studies, 2018

Following the fall of the Mongol Empire (c. 1206–1368) in both East andWest Asia, Zhu Yuanzhang (Hongwu Emperor, r. 1368–1398), the founder of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) in China, Timur (r. 1370–1405), founder of the Timurid Empire (1370–1507) in Central Asia, and their successors used the legacy of the Chinggisid Mongols in different ways to lend an aura of power and legitimacy to their newly established courts. In this paper, I explore the cultural legacy of the Mongol Empire as manifested in the early Ming and Timurid courts, with a special interest in how continuing cultural exchange between the two courts impacted the arts produced in both places. In particular, I highlight how the ongoing incorporation of “foreign” motifs and techniques set the tone for the arts of both courts in the late fourteenth century.

During the reign of Emperor Huan (147-67) of the Han dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) a family of merely local renown invested 'everything they had' in the construction of four decorated offering shrines for recently deceased men of the clan. According to inscriptions at the shrines, some of these men had held minor offices; others had devoted themselves to the study of the Confucian classics. They were typical of that class of scholars, officials and aspiring officials who were both the product and the mainstay of the Han imperial bureaucracy, the same bureaucracy that, some two centuries earlier, had displaced the hereditary military aristocracy characteristic of pre-Han society. 1 Today the Wu family enjoys something more than local renown, and all because of their decorated shrines, which have received the attentions of scholars for almost a thousand years. This venerable historiography may account for the fact that the shrines have been mentioned more frequently than most monuments in comparisons between Han and pre-Han times. Generally speaking these comparisons have not focused upon the social differences between petty lords and aspiring bureaucrats, but have emphasized instead the abandonment of the 'stylized' forms of pre-imperial vessel decor in favor of more 'realistic' modes of representation in Han times. 2 There is a difficulty with this comparison. Although more representational than the cauldron decor of the ancient kings, the pictures displayed at these shrines are far from what we would call 'realistic'. This discrepancy has given rise to much speculation concerning the style of the Wu Shrines engravings. The date, location, and function of the shrines have all been cited to explain the oddities of their style. Amidst this wealth of scholarship, no more than a few lines have been written of the patronage of these monuments, yet it may well be in its patronage that the art of the Han contrasts more sharply with the art of pre-imperial China. In 1948 it was suggested that the didactic and political character of many Han reliefs was due to the influence of the state controlled art production apparatus of the Han empire. The histories tell us that lacquerwares, mirrors and

The article analyzes miniatures from two Armenian manuscripts of the 1280s from the Cilician Kingdom. In them there are a variety of Chinese motifs, inspired by Oriental luxury items, ceramics or textiles probably, through personal contacts between the Armenian nobility and the Mongol court during a number of visits to the Mongol capital in Qaraqorum and the Il-Khans in Iran. Among the animals depicted is the famous phoenix-dragon motif, showing the two creatures together, the earliest such representation in the Near East. The Islamic examples such as the famous large tiles from the Il-Khanid palace at Takht-i Suleyman juxtaposes individual titles with a single animal in adjacent rows, but not together on the same ceramic. The paper also discusses possible stylistic influences from eastern art and emphasizes the masterly integration of these Chinese elements with the vast decorative scheme of these manuscripts, displaying an enormously brilliant eclecticism with borrowing from Europe as well as the Far East. Later studies, some already posted here on this theme have further developed the interpretation of such motifs.

Faces of China: Portrait Painting of the Ming and Qing Dynasties (1368–1912). Exhibition catalogue published in conjunction with the special exhibition of the Asian Art Museum, National Museums in Berlin. Petersberg: Michael Imhof, 2017.

“Portrait of Wang Menglou Playing Qin” (cat. 35), 174–175; “Portrait of Wang Yuyan Drawing Orchids” (cat. 36), 176–177; “Portrait of Tang Jinzhao in Leisure Activity” (cat. 44), 192–193; “Portrait of Tao Guan Appreciating an Inkstone” (cat. 46), 196–197; “Portrait of Married Couple Reading in a Studio” (cat. 61), 232–233.