The latest in a series on areas and periods of world art, this volume contains twenty-five chapters by different authors on diverse topics, loosely organized under five headings, and a two-part introduction. Martin Powers's “Historiographic Perspective” frames the book somewhat polemically as a project to counter approaches to art history that privilege Western perspectives. Its purpose is to give Western art historians, students, and the reading public substantive information about China's art-related practices and culture for “rethinking the core issues of the discipline” (p. 1). Endorsing recent scholarship in other fields of Chinese studies, Powers asserts that the West defends its presumed superiority by “denying, disguising, or trivializing those developments in China's history that are meant to feature as uniquely Western in triumphalist narratives” (p. 3). Thus, this collection of essays offers “a good dose of the facts” providing “the best cure for sophistry” (p. 12). Katherine Tsiang's “Overview of the Chapters” summarizes the contributions, most of them by prominent historians of Chinese art, with a few by scholars of archaeology, social history, or literature. The chapters are grouped under five topics: “Production and Distribution,” “Representation and Reality,” “Theories and Terms,” “Objects and Persons,” and “Word and Image.” To varying extents, the authors compare Chinese practices and social contexts with relevant counterparts in Europe, and one (Jessica Rawson's “Ornament in China”) also describes Chinese influence on the West.

Although conceived for readers outside the China field, such individuals will likely find many chapters extremely challenging, and not only because of the profusion of Chinese names and terms (characters are sometimes provided in glossary lists at the ends of the chapters). Each chapter has very few illustrations, and the reproductions are abysmally murky, suggesting unforgiveable economizing by the publisher.Footnote ¹ Since most authors refer to far more works than are illustrated (too often without citing a published reproduction), even readers who are knowledgeable about China will not always be able to fully appreciate the points being made. Many unillustrated references are familiar to well-read Chinese art historians, but some authors discuss examples that are little-known even to specialists. Each chapter has its own notes, bibliography, and suggested readings, but these often include Chinese publications without providing characters or translating the titles.Footnote ² Although China scholars can usually decipher them, the preponderance of such references defeats the purpose of encouraging other kinds of readers to explore further.

Despite these serious shortcomings, readers of this journal will find useful overviews, provocative ideas, insightful explanations, and interesting nuggets of information to reward engagement with the book's essays. Some offer comprehensive accounts covering very long periods (e.g., Qianshen Bai, “Calligraphy”; Peter Sturman, “Landscape”; Shane McCausland, “Figure Painting”; Xin Wu, “Garden Art”), while others focus on specific issues (e.g., Eugene Wang, “Time in Early Chinese Art”; Ginger Hsu, “Imitation, Originality, Theory and Practice”; Jason Kuo, “Emptiness-Substance: Xushi”). Here I summarize just a sample of the contributions, taken in roughly chronological order.

Wu Hung's chapter, “The Art of Ritual Artifacts (Liqi),” asserts that artistic creativity from the fourth millennium to the fifth century BCE centered on making special objects with ritual significance, whereas a discourse on distinctions between ordinary utensils and ceremonial objects emerged only in the Eastern Zhou period. Particularly as deployed in ancestral sacrifices, ritual artifacts symbolized political power and hereditary social privilege. Even after the Han introduced bureaucratic administration, however, “making, using, and cataloguing ritual artifacts continued throughout the dynastic era” (p. 248), sometimes to legitimize regimes.

Katherine Tsiang's “Visualizing the Divine in Medieval China” identifies common elements in religious imagery during the formative period of the third to sixth centuries, analyzing “figures of divine presence, sacred spaces and divine cosmologies, and landscape as sacred geography” (p. 159). The Buddhist introduction of iconic seated figures and practices of merit-making were assimilated into indigenous practices of Daoist and funerary art. Cave shrines, often decorated with divine or cosmological images, became important settings for Buddhist rituals and Daoist cultivation of immortality. The sacred space represented in mountain-landscape painting encompassed earlier beliefs concerning immortals and spirits, as well as “hagiographical traditions, based on legends about Daoist sages, Buddhist teachers, and their spiritual powers” (p. 170), making it a suitable vehicle for self-cultivation.

Patricia Ebrey's chapter, “Court Painting,” considers a single medium, painting, in the larger context of court culture of a single era, the Song dynasty (960–1279). After pointing out that China differed from Europe in that “upper-level officials were much more important at court than nobles” (p. 30) throughout the dynastic period, she usefully enumerates similarities in roles of the arts at both types of court. She attributes the high quality of paintings produced at the Song court to its emperors’ personal attention to art, institutions for recruiting and rewarding artists, and a shared culture vitalized by interactions between the court and the surrounding capital, conditions that rarely coincided in other dynasties. Her discussion concludes with some of the ways that paintings were used to advance political goals, which are not always evident to later viewers.

In “Classification, Canon, and Genre,” Richard Vinograd insightfully analyzes the ever-evolving systems for categorizing and evaluating calligraphy and painting. Art-related classification was socially embedded, drawing critical approaches from literature, assessment of candidates for office, and personality appraisal. Early formulations graded artists, while later ones usually shifted the focus to works, grouped according to genres whose boundaries and rankings frequently changed. In the late imperial period, groupings by artistic lineage and numerical schemes (e.g., Wu School, Four Wangs) gained prominence in the discourse and retain considerable currency today, as a visit to Chinese museums attests. Similarly, the canonization of authoritative models for emulation initially centered on artists and later shifted to individual works, which were promoted with institutional backing and transmitted via various modes of reproduction.

Ginger Hsu's chapter pursues these issues further by parsing important distinctions among copying, borrowing, quoting, paraphrasing, interpreting, alluding, citing, and appropriating in calligraphy and painting. In the influential case of Dong Qichang (1555–1636), lifelong intensive study of canonical masters provided a point of departure for his art-historically self-conscious stylistic inventions, which invoked earlier art through brushwork, motif, or compositional structure. Dong thereby created “a type of abstract art that operated through visual effects” and “liberated landscape painting from its function as a representational medium,” freeing it from “metaphorical, allegorical, and philosophical concepts” and even from the expression of “inner character or mood” (p. 306).

Dong Qichang is the villain in Jerome Silbergeld's chapter, “On the Origins of Literati Painting in the Song Dynasty,” which deftly demolishes the still-prevalent, simplistic view of literati painting as a “revolution” by Yuan scholar-amateur artists who painted only to express themselves, using calligraphic brushwork and nonrepresentational forms. Silbergeld blames Dong's “Northern and Southern Schools” theory for establishing oversimplified and misleading dichotomies between Song and Yuan, professional and amateur, court and scholar, and objective representation and subjective expression. Moreover, he argues that both the theory and the practice of literati painting (characterized as spontaneous, natural, awkward, poetic, nonmimetic, and personal) originated amid Northern Song factional opposition to Wang Anshi's (1021–86) reforms that emphasized technical skills and “set methods” (fa) (pp. 482–83). Also, Song and Yuan scholar-painters actually employed and esteemed many different styles and subject matters.

Several other chapters take up related issues, although not necessarily concurring with Silbergeld's revisionism (e.g., Ronald Egan, “Conceptual and Qualitative Terms in Historical Perspective”; Powers, “Artistic Status and Social Agency”; Susan Bush, “Poetry and Pictorial Expression in Chinese Painting”; Alfreda Murck, “Words in Chinese Painting”). Almost all chapters pay some attention to the status, values, and artistic pursuits of the literate elite.

In “Art, Print, and Cultural Discourse,” J. P. Park argues that the seventeenth-century popularity of printed illustrated treatises and manuals brought recognition to previously anonymous artisans and “provided the wider public with an alternative, democratized, and convenient means of gaining art-historical knowledge” (p. 82), as well as instruction in appropriate social and cultural practices to facilitate social climbing. He links the urban middle class's challenge to elite cultural hegemony with an intensified concern for authenticity and originality, individual uniqueness and subjectivity, and sharpened distinctions between elegance and vulgarity. However, Jianhua Chen's “Popular Literature and Visual Culture in Early Modern China” uses late Ming illustrated editions of Xixiang ji and Jin ping mei to demonstrate that the valorization of subjective feeling (qing) also encouraged voyeuristic viewing and erotic fantasizing.

Except for two chapters (Antonia Finnane's “Folding Fans and Early Modern Mirrors” and Tani Barlow's “Commercial Advertising Art in 1840s–1940s), the period covered in this volume ends at the Opium War. The editors do not explain why their project did not include the arts of modern and contemporary China, but perhaps another Companion is in the offing.”