Enfilade

From the University of Washington Press:

Claudia Brown, Glorious Qing: Decorative Arts in China, 1644–1911 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2024), 336 pages, ISBN: 978-0295751917, $70.

With over 250 color illustrations, this companion volume to Claudia Brown’s Great Qing: Painting in China, 1644–1911 covers an array of superbly crafted objects of art produced during China’s last dynasty. It features ceramics, metalwork, textiles, lacquer, glass, jade, and works of bamboo selected from collections in North America, Europe, China, and Taiwan. Art historian Brown probes the materials, motivations, technologies, and skills of Qing period artists, along with trends in art patronage and collecting. She considers objects of private patronage, including snuff bottles and instruments for the scholar’s desk, alongside imperial commissions, palace furnishings, and pieces made for export in the flourishing East-West trade market. Moving chronologically from one emperor’s reign to the next, Glorious Qing offers a comprehensive survey of Qing decorative arts that will delight experts and novices alike, from collectors to students of art history.

Claudia Brown is professor of art history at Arizona State University and research curator for Asian art at the Phoenix Art Museum. She is author of Great Qing: Painting in China, 1644–1911.

From the University of Washington Press:

Michele Matteini, The Ghost in the City: Luo Ping and the Craft of Painting in Eighteenth-Century China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2023), 248 pages, ISBN: 978-0295750958, $65.

In 1771 the artist Luo Ping (1733–1799) left his native Yangzhou to relocate to the burgeoning hub of Beijing’s Southern City. Over two decades, he became the favored artist of a cosmopolitan community of scholars and officials who were at the forefront of the cultural life of the Qing-dynasty (1644–1911). From his spectacular ghost paintings to his later work exploring the city’s complex history, compressed spatial layout, and unique social rituals, Luo Ping captured the pleasures and concerns of a changing world at the end of the Qing’s ‘Prosperous Age’. This study takes the reader into the vibrant artistic and literary cultures of Beijing outside the court and to the networks of scholars, artists, and entertainers that turned the Southern City into a place like no other in the Qing empire. At the center of this narrative lie Luo Ping’s layered reflections on the medium of painting and its histories and formal conventions. Close reading of the work of Luo Ping and his contemporaries reveals how this generation of experimental artists sought to reform ink painting, paving the way for further developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on a vast range of textual and visual sources, The Ghost in the City shares groundbreaking research that will transform our understanding of the evolution of modern ink painting.

Michele Matteini is assistant professor of art history at New York University and associate faculty at the Institute of Fine Arts.

c o n t e n t s

Acknowledgments
Note on Romanization

Introduction
1  The Dream of the Southern City
2  Luo Ping from Yangzhou
3  Textures of Samsara
4  Landscapes of Culture
Epilogue Luo Ping’s Returning Home

Dramatis Personae
Glossary of Chinese Characters
Notes
Bibliography
Index