A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture

A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture presents a collection of 26 original essays that explore and critically examine various aspects of the field of Asian art and architectural history. Featuring contributions from both leading scholars and emerging voices, the essays offer the opportunity to engage with the current state of scholarship in Asian art and to discover its rich diversity. In topics that range from ancient tombs and imperial commissions to coinage and cultural interaction, and from gardens and monastic spaces to performances and pilgrimages, this wide–ranging and insightful collection of essays illuminates the wide geographic and temporal range of Asian visual culture.

Authors explore the art of Korea, Japan, China, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and their diasporas, engaging issues related to colonial legacies and global interactions. Written by experts in art history, archaeology, geography, history, and anthropology, the essays are organized around six critical themes that reflect the current state of Asian art scholarship: Objects in Use, Space, Artists, Challenging the Canon, Shifting Meanings, and Elusive, Mobile Objects. With its multilayered presentation and wealth of thought–provoking new insights, A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture is an important addition to current scholarship that will reshape the way we consider Asian art.

List of Illustrations viii

Notes on Contributors xiv

Acknowledgments xx

Part I Introduction 1

1 Revisiting Asian Art 3
Rebecca M. Brown and Deborah S. Hutton

Part II Objects in Use 21

2 The Material Facts of Ritual: Revisioning Medieval Viewingthrough Material Analysis, Ethnographic Analogy, and ArchitecturalHistory 23
Kevin Gray Carr

3 Textiles and Social Action in Theravada Buddhist Thailand48
Leedom Lefferts

4 Functional and Nonfunctional Realism: Imagined Spaces for theDead in Northern Dynasties China 70
Bonnie Cheng

5 The Visible and the Invisible in a Southeast Asian World97
Jan Mrázek

Part III Space 121

6 Building Beyond the Temple: Sacred Centers and LivingCommunities in Medieval Central India 123
Tamara I. Sears

7 Urban Space and Visual Culture: The Transformation of Seoul inthe Twentieth Century 153
Kim Youngna

8 Unexpected Spaces at the Shwedagon 178
Elizabeth Howard Moore

9 The Changing Cultural Space of Mughal Gardens 201
James L. Wescoat Jr.

Part IV Artists 231

10 Old Methods in a New Era: What Can Connoisseurship Tell Usabout Rukn–ud–Din? 233
Molly Emma Aitken and Shanane Davis, with technical analysis byYana van Dyke

11 Convergent Conversations: Contemporary Art in Asian America264
Margo Machida

12 The Icon of the Woman Artist: Guan Daosheng (1262 1319)and the Power of Painting at the Ming Court c. 1500 290
Jennifer Purtle

13 Diasporic Body Double: The Art of the Singh Twins 318
Saloni Mathur

Part V Challenging the Canon 339

14 Re–evaluating Court and Folk Painting of Korea 341
Kumja Paik Kim

15 Conflict and Cosmopolitanism in Arab Sind365
Finbarr Barry Flood

16 In the Absence of the Buddha: Aniconism and theContentions of Buddhist Art History 398
Ashley Thompson

17 On Maurya Art 421
Frederick Asher

Part VI Shifting Meanings 445

18 Art, Agency, and Networks in the Career of Tokugawa Ieyasu(1543 1616) 447
Morgan Pitelka

19 Shiva Nataraja: Multiple Meanings of an Icon 471
Padma Kaimal

20 Sifting Mountains and Rivers through a Woven Lens:Repositioning Women and the Gaze in Fourteenth–Century East Java486
Kaja M. McGowan

21 Dead Beautiful: Visualizing the Decaying Corpse in NineStages as Skillful Means of Buddhism 513
Ikumi Kaminishi

22 In the Name of the Nation: Song Painting and ArtisticDiscourse in Early Twentieth–Century China 537
Cheng–hua Wang

Part VII Elusive, Mobile Objects 561

23 Chinese Painting: Image–Text–Object 563
De–nin Deanna Lee

24 Locating Tomyoji and Its Six Kannon Sculpturesin Japan 580
Sherry Fowler

25 The Unfired Clay Sculpture of Bengal in the Artscape ofModern South Asia 604
Susan S. Bean

26 Malraux s Buddha Heads 629
Gregory P. A. Levine

Index 655

Rebecca M. Brown is visiting Associate Professor in the History of Art and Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, USA. Her publications include  Gandhi′s Spinning Wheel and the Making of India (2010), and  Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980 (2009)

Deborah S. Hutton is Associate Professor of Art History at The College of New Jersey, USA. She is the author of Art of the Court of Bijapur (2006), which received the American Institute of Indian Studies Edward Cameron Dimock Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities.

Together, Rebecca Brown and Deborah Hutton have edited Asian Art: An Anthology (Wiley–Blackwell, 2006).