Search results for ""author stanley k. abe""

This text explores the large body of sculpture, paintings and other religious imagery produced for China's common classes from the third to the sixth centuries CE. In contrast to the works made for imperial patrons, illustrious monastics, or other luminaries, these ordinary images - modest in scale, mass-produced, and at times incomplete - were created for those of lesser standing. Because they cannot be related to well-known historical figures or social groups, these images have been considered a largely nebulous, undistinguished mass of works. Situating his study in the gaps between conventional categories such as Buddhism, Daoism and Chinese popular art, Stanley K. Abe examines works (including some of the earliest known examples of Buddha-like images in China) that were commissioned by patrons of modest standing and produced by nameless artists and artisans.

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Collecting China: The World, China, and A Short History of Collecting is a unique collection of essays that brings together theories of materiality and what collecting has meant to various peoples over time. Collecting China grew out of a simple question: how does a thing become Chinese? Fifteen essays explore this question from different angles, ranging from close examination of world-renowned private collections (the Rockefellers, the Goncourts, the Walters, the du Ponts, the Yeh family, and the Getty Research Institute, among others) to critical reinterpretations of historical writings that continue from records of Emperor Wu Di of the Han Dynasty to the story of Robinson Crusoe and the first international exhibition of Chinese art. With accounts that incorporate records normally unavailable to the public, the authors map the vast network of collecting practices in different periods, and demonstrate the ways in which material things produced in China acquire new cultural identities through collecting practices.

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