Facing China: Truth and Memory in Portraiture

by Richard Vinograd

Overview

A highly illustrated examination of portraiture in China across media and millennia.
 
Facing China is an exploration of the portrait arts in China from the dynastic to the modern and contemporary, in painting, sculpture, photography, and video. The book focuses on truth and memory in the portraiture process, from encounters between subject, portrait, and artist, to broader familial, social, and political arenas. It also examines the influence of location on portrait production, reception, and display, from tombs, ancestral shrines, temples, gardens, and palace halls to public and private spaces.
 
Featuring one hundred fifty fine illustrations, with one hundred in color, Facing China has much to say to specialists in the field as well as general readers interested in Chinese art.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781789145328
Publisher:	Reaktion Books, Limited
Publication date:	09/01/2022
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	7.50(w) x 9.75(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Richard Vinograd is the Christensen Fund Professor in Asian Art in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. He is the author or coauthor of many books including Ink Worlds: Contemporary Chinese Painting from the Collection of Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Portrait in the Peony Pavilion 7

1 Identifications: Familial Relations in Space and Time 17

2 Interfaces: Foreign Relations 59

3 Recognitions: Portrait Socialities 127

4 Bodies of Portraiture 185

5 Critical Inflections: Portraits In Question 232

References 285

Select Bibliography 302

Acknowledgements 310

List of Illustrations 312

Index 323

Editorial Reviews

Facing China casts a broader vision across time and space that fully reflects the author’s erudition, traversing boundaries between the historical and the modern/contemporary China and engaging cross-cultural issues beyond China to the global.

Hui-shu Lee

"Vinograd’s brilliant Facing China fearlessly renegotiates the challenging territory of the Chinese portrait. Through attentive analysis and compelling readings, he offers a rich new vision of the portrait as agent and interface, one capable of generating human bonds and identities across lineage, community, cultures, and time."

Roberta Wue

"Facing China, drawing on Vinograd’s unsurpassed knowledge of the historical materials as well as his profoundly theoretical and creative approaches, is a brilliant and unprecedented study of portraits in Chinese visual culture."

J. P. Park

"Among the first substantial gatherings of visuals of ancient, modern, and contemporary Chinese portraits in various formats and from around the world, this volume provides valuable firsthand visual materials for further study and exploration. . . Recommended."

Choice