The party at Lan-T'ing, Los Angeles, 1991

The Lanting (sometimes rendered as "Orchid Pavilion") gathering in 353 is one of the most famous literati parties in Chinese history. ' This gathering inspired the celebrated preface written by the great calligrapher Wang Xizhi ï^è. (303-361), another preface by the poet Sun Chuo i^s^ (314-371), and forty-one poems composed by some of the most intellectually active men of the day.^ The poems are not often studied since they have long been overshadowed by Wang's preface as a work of calligraphic art and have been treated as examples oí xuanyan ("discourse on the mysterious [Dao]") poetry,^ whose fate in literary history suffered after influential Six Dynasties writers decried its damage to the classical tradition. 'Ĥ istorian Tan Daoluan tliË;^ (fl. 459) traced the trend to its full-blown development in Sun Chuo and Xu Xun l^gt] (fl. ca. 358), who were said to have continued the work of inserting Daoist terms into poetry that was started by Guo Pu MM (276-324); they moreover "added the [Buddhist] language of the three worlds [past, present, and future], and the normative style of the Shi W and Sao M came to an end."^ Critic Zhong Rong M^ (ca. 469-518) then faulted their works for lacking appeal. His critique was nothing short of scathing: he argued

Th is article examines birthday albums, a genre that combines paintings and literary texts in calligraphy, produced by a group of peer artists and writers to celebrate birthdays of elders in the Wu region (Suzhou) during the mid-Ming period (1450-1550). Each album pairs paintings and texts devoted to a series of locales im por tant to the honoree. Place mediated social, physical, and cultural experiences among groups of literati as they commemorated their social activities and their bodily and intellectual engagement with the sites. Birthday albums defi ned an aesthetic format of artistic and literary practices at that time. As a collection that synthesized multivalent associations, birthday albums documented a cultural fi eld of mid-Ming Suzhou. Artists and writers collaborated in a broader cultural practice that valorized contemporary works made by groups of associates that express the makers' and honorees' nuanced collective sensibility of "our time."

2012

J ust over a year ago, Jane and Leopold Swergold surprised and delighted the Bellarmine Museum of Art with a gift of four Han and Tang pottery objects from their stellar collection of ancient Chinese art. We were, of course, thrilled to accept their generous donation, which not only filled an important gap in the museum's permanent collection but also catalyzed a series of enriching conversations about Chinese art and culture at the museum; conversations that culminated in Immortality of the Spirit: Chinese Funerary Art from the Han and Tang Dynasties, on view at the Bellarmine from April 12-June 6, 2012. This exhibition was envisioned by the museum as a platform not only for highlighting the Swergolds' remarkable gift but also enhancing our visitors' understanding of ancient Chinese funerary art by placing such objects in a broader cultural context. Thus the Bellarmine's Sichuan Qin Player, Pair of Green Glazed Grooms, and Figure of a Soldier are accompanied in our galleries by nine related objects, all of which were generously lent to the museum by the Swergolds for this show. The care with which the Swergolds' collection was assembled is evinced both by its exceptionally high quality and by its remarkable internal coherence. Their fine holdings equally bear witness to the vast stores of knowledge they have accumulated over the course of the past two decades, as the Swergolds developed into world-class connoisseurs (a favorable term, derived from the French verb connaître, that suggests expansive knowledge and nuanced understanding) of Chinese art. The depth of their learning (Mrs. Swergold, who taught Interior Design at Fairfield University for over twenty years, wrote her MA thesis on Chinese tester beds, while Mr. Swergold has served as a trustee at the Smithsonian Institution's Freer-Sackler Galleries in Washington, DC, currently sits on the Collections Committee of the Harvard University Museums and organized and directed Treasures Rediscovered-Chinese Stone Sculpture from the Sackler Collections at Columbia University, an exhibition which premiered in Manhattan in the spring of 2008 before traveling to the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida,

The China Journal, 2011

Western understandings of the trajectory of Chinese art following Mao’s death in 1976 have been hampered by several factors. A persistent element is the propensity of Western art historians and critics to impose Western historical patterns, esthetic standards and critical methods to the analysis of Chinese art, its production and expression. This tendency was exacerbated by China’s closing to the West after 1949, which discouraged scholarship and Chinese language study and resulted in a 30-year hiatus in scholarly communications and firsthand knowledge—a situation that invited imagination and speculation that favored an obsessive preference in the West for art that could be interpreted as politically subversive. When China re-opened in the 1980s, scholars of contemporary Chinese art faced the further problem of trying to make sense of an anarchic disarray of theories and practices rushing in to fill the vacuum afforded by the collapse of Marxism-Leninism-Mao-Zedong ideology. The prolific but scattered writings and publications by Chinese artists, critics and theorists were accessible only to those few who already possessed a high level of Chinese language facility including the specially nuanced vocabulary of the art world, as well as a wide-ranging and balanced network of interpersonal contacts. This volume addresses the need for wider access to primary Chinese sources by readers of English.

China Review International, 2021

Review Chinese Funerary Biographies: An Anthology of Remembered Lives ed. by Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Ping Yao and Cong Ellen Zhang

China Review International, 2022

The dissident in post-Tiananmen Chinese art history has been fetishized by the West. Peggy Wang highlights in The Future History of Contemporary Chinese Art that this misplaced attention shoehorns artwork, neglects artistic agency, and ignores how artists in the s responded to a wide swathe of cultural and intellectual dialogues. Addressing this dissident trope, chapter , titled "Spaces of Self-Recognition," probes art criticism and major debates in the s and uncovers new lines of inquiry that indigenize the understanding of post-Tiananmen Chinese art history. One debate was the how and why of bridging the distance and differences between contemporary Chinese art and established centers of the art world. Art critics contended that Chinese artists must develop their own standard and objectives. Rather than emulating Western styles and modes of making art, Chinese artists, critics held, should embrace the history and culture of minzu or Chinese ethnicity. "New Realism," exemplified by the oil paintings of Liu Xiaodong (b. ) and Yu Hong (b. ), gained appeal among critics who found that realist ideology embraces minzu and orients the future of contemporary Chinese art. By focusing on China's social reality and local environments, Chinese artists, as critics hypothesized, could bring lived experience to the center of their art, embrace contemporaneity without succumbing to Western art, and profess "Chineseness" (p. ) without being fettered to the past. Such direction could make China a new contemporary art center. Pivoting on this sentiment in the art circle in the s, Wang, in subsequent chapters, spotlights five artists whose works have largely suffered from well worn, limited interpretations derived from the dissident lens and explores how they used their works to claim agency in their own world. These five artists are Zhang Xiaogang (b. ), Wang Guangyi (b. ), Sui Jianguo (b. ), Zhang Peili (b. ), and Lin Tianmiao (b. ). Titled "Zhang Xiaogang: Bloodline and Belonging," chapter  focuses on how the early works in Zhang's Bloodline series (begun in ) speaks to the artist's shifting engagement with the world and artistic explorations, as well as an art historical lineage in representing "relationship." During his study at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in , Zhang's works were greatly inspired by Review

2001

De medio aevo, 2023

Resumen. Wang Wei es el mejor ejemplo paradigmático del sincretismo artístico religioso que caracteriza a la dinastía Tang. Durante esta dinastía se produce una síntesis de tres religiones, taoísmo, confucianismo y budismo, en la que se intercambian y mezclan elementos artísticos con expresiones doctrinales. Esta nueva síntesis, que da origen a la expresión china San jiao he yi 三 教 合 一 ("tres enseñanzas hacen una"), creó un valioso conjunto de manifestaciones artísticas que toman forma en las obras de Wang Wei. En este artículo analizamos un rollo vertical de Wang Wei que forma parte del patrimonio inventariado en la Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Es un paisaje titulado "la villa junto al río Wang", y retrata una escena en un jardín chino por excelencia. Es un raro ejemplo de rollo vertical, en el que aparecen 24 sellos antiguos, verificados uno a uno a partir de diferentes fuentes. Cuatro pertenecen al canciller Jia Sidao (s. XIII), incluido el famoso sello Chang, y ocho al catálogo de sellos de los emperadores Qianlong y Jiaqing (siglo XVIII y principios del XIX). Tres no han sido identificados y uno está muy borroso. El contenido de este rollo aparece citado en la lista de 126 pinturas atribuidas a Wang Wei en el catálogo Xuanhe patrocinado por el emperador Song Huizong en el año 1120. En el siglo XXI aparece como un homenaje secular, "obra impresionante

Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 2019

During the early development of the People's Republic of China, major cities were industrialised and historical architecture was severely neglected. The Cultural Revolution (1966-76) provided an extraordinary example of political mobilisation directed against the material and cultural vestiges of the past. 1 During the infamous movement of the Red Guards, China's public properties and cultural relics were attacked and numerous art treasures and artefacts were destroyed. The Open-Door policy beginning in 1978 instigated another 'revolution'-of economic reform and urban transformation. Thirty years of rapid urbanisation have meant that few traditional constructions have survived, and even the buildings and complexes built during the early PRC proved to be transitory, once they had been removed, reconstructed or replaced. Since the 1980s, the pace of globalisation and the force of its reshaping influences have posed a serious threat to the sustainability of tradition within Chinese arts and culture, as Western architecture, furniture, fashion and products have permeated Chinese cities; which has seen the gradual transformation of the everyday into an 'internationalised' style of living. Urbanisation and tourism have turned Chinese traditional art and crafts from indigenous to touristic and commercial, from the 'local' to 'global'. Traditional design and hand-making skills in numerous productions, such as textiles, porcelain, wood-and stonecarving, are declining, either because their craftsmanship lacks the avenues of future inheritance and transmission, or because they have been substituted by the cursory processes of batch production for tourists. Now, much of what is described as 'traditional' is no longer part of an everyday reality, but is instead an item of material culture ranging from