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A Companion to Chinese Art. Edited by Martin J. Powers and Katherine R. Tsiang . Wiley Blackwell Companions to Art History, Vol. 8. Chichester, U.K.: John Wiley & Sons, 2016. xviii, 562 pp. ISBN: 9781444339130 (cloth, also available as e-book).
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. 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...