East Asian Art & Architecture: Images & Maps

"This catalogue explores New York's superlative private collections of Japanese, Chinese and Korean art through a broad and diverse selection of paintings, calligraphy, sculpture, ceramics, and lacquerware that reflect the highest achievements of the classical traditions of East Asian culture. Leading authorities of Asian art discuss the objects within the dynamic context of East Asia as an enduring cultural sphere, offering an expanded view of the art of this region as it traversed national boundaries, transforming and being transformed in the process."

This text covers the historical techniques of painting in Japan, China and Korea.

Past in Reverse: Contemporary Art of East Asia features 22 artists and artist groups from Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea. As strategies for incorporating cultural and artistic genealogies in their work, these practitioners variously access traditional materials and techniques, established philosophical underpinnings and behaviors surrounding the production and use of material culture. The region's cultural hybridization is asserted in their declaration that East and West are not separate and that the one is embedded in the other. Art historical interdependencies within the region, in relationship to current systems of global connectivity, supply a dynamic framework for understanding these works of art.

With a multi-perspective approach and transdisciplinary methods (humanities and sciences), this book offers an in-depth and systematic study of hand-drawn and hand-coloured maps from East Asia. Map colouring provides an insight into past societies, landscapes and territories. Colour is an important key to a more precise understanding of the map's content, purposes and uses; moreover, colours are also an important aspect of a map's materiality. The material scientific analysis of colourants makes it possible to find out more about maps' material nature and their production as well as the social, geographical and political context in which they were made. 'Reading' colours in this way gives a glimpse into the social lives of mapmakers as well as map users and reveals the complexity of the historical and social context in which maps were produced and how the maps were actually made.