Vivan sundaram is not a photographer

Belonging to a generation of figurative artists that emerged from the Baroda School in the early 1960s, Vivan Sundaram has consistently and passionately engaged with the historical and political particularities of his own position as a subject in India and in the world at large. Ruth Rosengarten ...

The body incantatory

The Body Incantatory reveals the histories and logics of practice of deeply embodied forms of Buddhist ritual. Paul Copp vividly captures the diversity of Buddhist practice among medieval monks, ritual healers, and other individuals lost to history, offering a corrective to accounts that have ove...

Nationalism and indigenousness in select commonwealth writings and films

Collects 24 essays that analyze select literary writings and films from the so-called ‘Commonwealth countries to explore how the concerned writers and filmmakers have depicted issues of nationalism and indigeneity.

Salon salon

Salon, Salon explores Beijing’s art scene in the decade from the late Cultural Revolution to the beginning of the Reform and Opening-up period. It focuses on the continuous influence of the ideological structure of socialist realism on the practice and discourse of contemporary Chinese art.

Conversations

Ai Weiwei is one of the world’s most acclaimed artists and dissidents. This book presents him in conversation with theorists, critics, journalists, and curators about key moments in his life and career.These wide-ranging conversations flow between topics such as his relationship with China, the m...

A vibrant voyage from china

This book showcases the pith paper paintings collected by The Chinese University of Hong Kong Library.

Remembrance in clay and stone

This book explores the memorial and funerary artistic traditions of Southwest China during the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 CE).

Fixing landscape

Fixing Landscape reconsiders China’s Three Gorges Dam in relation to the aesthetic history of the Gorges region over more than two millennia, thereby offering radically new ways of thinking about cultural and spatial production in contemporary China.

Chinese thirdspace

This wide-ranging and theoretically rich book examines how a diverse set of Chinese intellectuals carved out in-between spaces beyond the poles of competing ideologies for greater openness, multiplicity, and pluralism.

The lyrical in epic time

In this book, David Der-wei Wang uses the lyrical to rethink the dynamics of Chinese modernity. Although the form may seem unusual for representing China's social and political crises in the mid-twentieth century, Wang contends that national cataclysm and mass movements intensified Chinese lyrici...

Art cinema and india’s forgotten futures

Rochona Majumdar examines key works of Indian art cinema to demonstrate how film emerged as a mode of doing history and that, in so doing, it anticipated some of the most influential insights of postcolonial thought. She analyzes the films of Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak as well as...

The allure of the mirror

In Han China, few luxury objects were as widely coveted as bronze mirrors. Yanlong Guo explores how and why these objects became so beloved throughout early imperial China, uncovering the varied ways these seemingly trivial objects took on social and cultural significance.

A legacy of elegance

Many Shang dynasty inscribed oracle bones were found at Yinxu, Henan province. Their purpose and function shed significant light on the origin of Chinese culture, disclosing major concerns of the time. Shang oracle-bone script is the earliest known form of systematic Chinese writing, which is a c...

A history of cultic images in china

Work on the culture of central Hunan has been one of the most exciting sources for rethinking the nature and variety of Chinese local society. Based on two decades of international collaborative research, Alain Arrault focuses on sculpted images of local people and studies them on the basis of co...

Readings of the vessantara jātaka

Anthropologists, textual scholars in religious and Buddhist studies, and art historians engage in sophisticated readings of the text and its ethics of giving, understanding of attachment and nonattachment, depiction of the trickster, and unique performative qualities

Cut-pieces

Imagine watching an action film in a small-town cinema hall in Bangladesh, and in between the gun battles and fistfights a short pornographic clip appears. This is known as a cut-piece, a strip of locally made celluloid pornography surreptitiously spliced into the reels of action films in Banglad...

Speech acts

Speech Acts contains select interviews that annotate Geeta Kapur’s contributions to modern Indian art criticism and trace her interrogations of the contemporary through various historical conjunctures

Alluring monsters

The pontianak, a terrifying female vampire ghost, is a powerful figure in Malay cultures. Exploring how and why the pontianak found new life in postcolonial Southeast Asian film and society, Rosalind Galt reveals the importance of cinema to histories and theories of decolonization.

Another lens

The book situates diverse lens-based practices within a larger orbit of South Asian visual culture.

Japan and the culture of the four seasons

Elegant representations of nature and the four seasons populate a wide range of Japanese genres and media—from poetry and screen painting to tea ceremonies, flower arrangements, and annual observances. In Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons, Haruo Shirane shows how, when, and why this pract...

Becoming guanyin

Yuhang Li examines how lay Buddhist women in late imperial China forged a connection with the subject of their devotion, arguing that women used their own bodies to echo that of Guanyin. She combines empirical research with theoretical insights from both art history and Buddhist studies.

Chinese film classics, 1922–1949

Chinese Film Classics, 1922–1949 is an essential guide to the first golden age of Chinese cinema. Christopher Rea reveals the uniqueness and complexity of Republican China’s cinematic masterworks, from the comedies and melodramas of the silent era to talkies and musicals of the 1930s and 1940s.

Bollywood

While we have become familiar with the idea of "Bollywood" here in the West, we know little about the industry's films beyond a certain celebration of kitsch. Bollywood, the latest in Wallflower Press's Short Cuts introductory series, surveys this style of filmmaking from its origins in colonial ...

Spells, images, and mandalas

Koichi Shinohara traces the evolution of Esoteric Buddhist rituals from the simple recitation of spells in the fifth century to complex systems involving image worship, mandala initiation, and visualization practices in the ninth century. He presents an important new reading of a seventh-century ...

Chinese architecture

An unprecedented survey of the origins and evolution of Chinese architecture, from the last millennia BCE to todayThroughout history, China has maintained one of the world’s richest built civilizations. The nation’s architectural achievements range from its earliest walled cities and the First Em...

Understanding japanese buddhist sculpture through visual comparison

A beginner’s guide to appreciating Buddha statues from a whole new perspective. This book is an introductory guide to help you familiarize yourself with Buddhist sculpture, and the basic principal behind the book is understanding Buddhist sculpture through visual comparison. Avoiding explanations...

Once more unto the breach

Flowers of edo

Machiya: the traditional townhouses of kyoto

Japanese gardens: kyoto

96 breathtakingly stunning Japanese gardens you must visit in Kyoto Kyoto’s gardens are among the city’s many glories. They are beautiful, thought-provoking. These unparalleled works of art at the creative frontier between man and nature date mainly from the Kamakura, Muromachi, and early Edo per...

Yokai storyland

The absurd and surreal world of Yokai is back with full of stories to tellFollowing the success of Yokai Musuem and Yokai Wonderland, we are proud to publish Yokai Storyland, the third book from Yumoto Koichi, renowned Yokai art collector who has collected more than 4,000 artworks ranging from pa...

Buddhas in the palm of your hand

Retrospective scenes from a sentimental world

This third book in the background illustration series takes us on a sentimental journey through the scenes of our most cherished memoriesDo you remember a moment in your life when you wished the time would stop? Artwork in this book captures precious moments such as these, evoking your own precio...

Captivating forms

Breathing space

In this groundbreaking guide, former investment banker Philippe Espinasse explains the process of gathering cornerstone investors in connection with IPOs and other equity offerings.Using his trademark simple and jargon-free language, he details the targeting strategies, documentation, marketing, ...

At freedom's limit

At Freedom’s Limit: Islam and the Postcolonial Predicament is a critique of how the current anthropology and sociology of Islam has used Muslims as a discursive site on which contemporary aporias of modernity are worked out. The book shows that some of the most intricate critiques of Islamism an...

Kimono and the colors of japan (new printing edition)

This distinctive volume reveals a unique antique kimono collection through various delicate Japanese colors and their use in kimono. The Japanese sensibility is immediately apparent in the classification of the nine traditional color categories of red, green, pink, blue, brown, purple, yellow, bl...