Description
Book SynopsisIn early nineteenth-century China, a remarkable transformation took place in the art world: artists among China's educated elites began to use touch to forge a more authentic relationship to the past, to challenge stagnant artistic canons, and to foster deeper human connections. Networks of Touch is an engaging exploration of this sensory turn. In this book, Michael J. Hatch examines the artistic network of Ruan Yuan (17641849), a scholar-official whose patronage supported a generation of artists and learned people who prioritized epigraphic research as a means of truing the warped contours of Confucian heritage. Their work instigated an epigraphic aesthetican appropriation of the stylistic, material, and tactile features of ancient inscribed objects and their reproductive technologiesin late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century artwork. Rubbings, a reduplicative technology, challenged the dominance of brushwork as the bearer of artistic authority. While brushwork represented the
Trade Review“Thoroughly researched, smartly conceived, and artfully presented, Networks of Touch is one of those rare books that would satisfy both the specialist scholar and the general reader. With his intellectual ambition, formal visual analysis skills, and fine eye for details, Hatch has enlivened both the forest and the trees down to the textures of the bark and leaf.”
—Dorothy Ko,author of The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China
