Overview

No other civilization in the premodern world was more obsessed with creating underground burial structures than the Chinese. For at least five thousand years, from the fourth millennium BCE to the early twentieth century, Chinese people devoted an extraordinary amount of wealth and labor to building tombs and furnishing them with exquisite objects and images. In art history these ancient sites have mainly been appreciated as treasure troves of exciting and often previously unknown works of art. New trends in Chinese art history are challenging this way of studying funerary art: Now an entire memorial site--rather than its individual components--has become the focus of both observation and interpretation. The Art of Yellow Springs expands on this scholarship by making interpretive methods the direct subject of consideration. It argues that to achieve a genuine understanding of Chinese tombs we need to reconsider a host of art-historical concepts, including visuality, viewership, space, formal analysis, function, and context.

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Most informative and innovative ... written in a lucid style that should appeal to both engaged and general readers. Wu Hung has again proven himself to be a ground-breaker of Chinese art history. -- David D. W. Wang

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