China has an age-old zoomorphic tradition. The First Emperor was famously said to have had the heart of a tiger and a wolf. The names of foreign tribes were traditionally written with characters that included animal radicals. In modern times; the communist government frequently referred to Nationalists as ldquo;running dogs;rdquo; and President Xi Jinping; vowing to quell corruption at all levels; pledged to capture both ldquo;the tigersrdquo; and ldquo;the flies.rdquo; Splendidly illustrated with works ranging from Bronze Age vessels to twentieth-century conceptual pieces; this volume is a wide-ranging look at zoomorphic and anthropomorphic imagery in Chinese art. The contributors; leading scholars in Chinese art history and related fields; consider depictions of animals not as simple; one-for-one symbolic equivalents: they pursue in depth; in complexity; and in multiple dimensions the ways that Chinese have used animals from earliest times to the present day to represent and rhetorically stage complex ideas about the world around them; examining what this means about China; past and present.In each chapter; a specific example or theme based on real or mythic creatures is derived from religious; political; or other sources; providing the detailed and learned examination needed to understand the means by which such imagery was embedded in Chinese cultural life. Bronze Age taotie motifs; calendrical animals; zoomorphic modes in Tantric Buddhist art; Song dragons and their painters; animal rebuses; Heaven-sent auspicious horses and foreign-sent tribute giraffes; the fantastic specimens depicted in the Qing Manual of Sea Oddities; the weirdly indeterminate creatures found in the contemporary art of Huang Yong Pingmdash;these and other notable examples reveal Chinese attitudes over time toward the animal realm; explore Chinese psychology and patterns of imagination; and explain some of the critical means and motives of Chinese visual culture.The Zoomorphic Imagination in Chinese Art and Culture will find a ready audience among East Asian art and visual culture specialists and those with an interest in literary or visual rhetoric.Contributors: Sarah Allan; Qianshen Bai; Susan Bush; Daniel Greenberg; Carmelita (Carma) Hinton; Judy Chungwa Ho; Kristina Kleutghen; Kathlyn Liscomb; Jennifer Purtle; Jerome Silbergeld; Henrik Soslash;rensen; and Eugene Y. Wang.
2016-09-16 2016-09-16File Name: B01LWWUPHE
Review
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Soviet Emigre ArtistsBy cortezhillThe public became aware of new ferment in the Soviet art world in 1962. when Nikita Khrushchev pungently expressed his distate for some modernist works of painting and sculpture exhibited at the Moscow Manege. and again in 1974. when police bulldozed an "unofficial" open air art exhibition in Moscow and roughed up the spectators.Not so well known is the fact that quite a few of the Soviet artists whose nonconformity to the canons of socialist reform once brought them world attention now live and work in the United States. often in relative obscurity. What motivated these artists to leave the USSR? Why did they chose to come to the United States? How have they fared in their new lives and careers?In this study a sociologist and two art historians. one an emigre. the other an American. seek to answer these questions. drawing on interviews with the artists themselves and examples of their work. Together the essays provide a revealing new perspective on the lives and work of contemporary artists. the difficulties they encounter in two very different cultural worlds. and the experience of attempting a transistion from one to the other.--- from books dustjacket
