Description
Book SynopsisQing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West examines how the encounters between China and Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries transformed the arts on both sides of the East-West divide. The essays in the volume reveal the extent to which images, artifacts, and natural specimens were traded and copied, and how these materials inflected both cultures' visions of novelty and pleasure, battle and power, and ways of seeing and representing. Artists and craftspeople on both continents borrowed and adapted forms, techniques, and modes of representation, producing deliberate, meaningful, and complex hybrid creations. By considering this reciprocity from both Eastern and Western perspectives, Qing Encounters offers a new and nuanced understanding of this critical period.
Trade Review"If modernity can be considered in terms of intensified transcultural exchanges, the volume helps to reset its origins for China and the West to at least one hundred years before the accustomed chronology. . . . Overcoming the traditional bias towards the "fine arts" in art-historical writing, volume moves easily between painting, print, architecture, textiles, interior decoration and technical instruments." --Burlington Magazine "Beautifully illustrated. . . . [This volume] offers a serious treatment of . . . a complex problem through the diversity of the methodologies and perspectives adopted by its contributors."--New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century
