Yuka Kadoi. Islamic Chinoiserie: The Art of Mongol Iran

2012

2014

The history of Chinese art has been written profusely through a wide range of different perspectives in recent decades. Some art historians have focused their attention on the various segments of the timeline of Chinese art, whilst others have been specifically driven to a typological study of ceramics, jades, ritual bronzes, painting, sculpture, textiles, decorative arts or any other kind of art form produced in China during a single period or spanning the historical development and range of artistic sophistication of this typology. Furthermore, art historians have also examined the history of Chinese arts according to specific subject matter, discussing the arts in the court, burial art, religious arts and temple architecture, the exchange between China and the West, the arts along the Silk Road, just to mention a few examples.

Transnational Issues in Asian Design, Christine Guth, ed. (London: Bloomsbury)., 2018

This essay surveys the development of chinoiserie, objects and images emulating or responding to Chinese art and culture, in the early modern era. While most scholarship on chinoiserie discusses the style as a European phenomenon, this essay considers the style in a global context.

Space and Culture, India, ACCB, 2018

The article considers the role of Central Asian traditions in the formation and development of Mongolian fine arts. The authors reveal the significance of various factors for the formation of the original stylistics, which manifested itself in the methods, techniques and pictorial means typical of Mongolian art. The article defines the role of Indian artistic traditions in the development of Mongolian fine arts. The authors claim that Mongolian religious painting on scrolls is a bright artistic phenomenon based on the strict canon developed in India and inherited by many cultures of Asia. The means of artistic depiction, iconography, a system of proportions, borrowed and modified by the Mongols, had been developed in the cradle of Indian civilisation. The purpose of the article is to study the features of Mongolian fine arts on the basis of ethnic traditions, as well as to consider this phenomenon using the example of traditional and contemporary painting. Multiculturalism conditioned by the polyethnic nature of the region played an important role in the history of Mongolian culture. The renewal of ethnocultural experience is related to the artistic traditions brought from India, Tibet and China, but in Mongolian art, there is no predominance of any forms of other cultures. Hence, the art is original and has its unique features. As a result of the combination of the ornamental pictorial technique of nomadic cultures with the painting techniques of sedentary peoples, an artistic style based on the Buddhist canon, supplemented by original ethnocultural elements, was formed. In the process of mastering and developing the artistic experience based on the traditions of planar painting, icon painting, arts and crafts, folklore, a new art direction "Mongol Zurag" appeared in the 20th century. The creative method of modern masters proves that while working in various trends, genres, techniques, individual manners, they preserve and develop national traditions in painting. Consequently, the preservation of the artistic-aesthetic heritage of the ethnos has a positive effect on fine arts and the vitality of culture in general.

Verge: Studies in Global Asias, 2018

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