Free PDF Empire of Great Brightness: Visual and Material Cultures of Ming China, 1368-1644, by Craig Clunas
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Empire of Great Brightness: Visual and Material Cultures of Ming China, 1368-1644, by Craig Clunas
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Empire of Great Brightness is an innovative and accessible history of a high point in Chinese culture as explored through the riches of its images and objects. Emphasizing the vibrant interactions between China and the rest of Asia at this period, it challenges notions of Ming China as a culture closed off from the rest of the world. Eminent historian Craig Clunas uses a wide range of pictures and objects from Ming China to illustrate areas such as painting and ceramics. He also draws on items like weapons and textiles from public and private collections, as well as contemporary sources from government edicts to novels, to illuminate this most diverse period of Chinese art and culture. Empire of Great Brightness offers a varied and stimulating resource for scholars of China’s cultural history, historians and art historians of related aspects of the early modern world, and readers who are intrigued by China’s past.�“An excellent companion for the study of Ming art, as well as giving established scholars food for thought and engaging in Ming Chinese culture.”—Art Newspaper
“This is an eminently readable history of the high point of Chinese cultures, seen through the riches of its images and objects.”—Asian Art Survey
- Sales Rank: #2770248 in Books
- Published on: 2012-07-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.80" h x .70" w x 7.50" l, 1.98 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 288 pages
Review
“An excellent companion for the study of Ming art, as well as giving established scholars food for thought and engaging in Ming Chinese culture.”
(Art Newspaper)
About the Author
Craig Clunas is professor of History of Art at the University of Oxford. He is the author of many books, including Fruitful Sites: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China and Elegant Debts: The Social Art of Wen Zhengming, also published by Reaktion Books.
Most helpful customer reviews
10 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Beautiful and disorderly
By reader 451
What could be more interesting than a portrait of Ming culture, perhaps the height of Chinese civilisation in pre-modern times? But Craig Clunas, though his book uses superb illustrations, makes a hash of it. Clunas just has to kowtow to postmodernist canons, such as by which boundaries are always burred, meanings relative, narratives are banned, and there is a lot of hybridity everywhere. Predictably, the result is messy.
Empire of Great Brightness makes the argument that Ming China (Ming meaning something like brightness in Chinese) was held together by a prolific visual and material culture. Its chapters are organised around concepts (time and space, movement, violence, etc.), which might be fine except that the concepts are lofty and vague, making the argument hard to track. First, the text jumps from one anecdote to another often without logic, with the result that these fail to register as a group. Second, Clunas's cultural observations are severed from their political, social, and everyday moorings, and are hard to follow for the non-specialist. Much of his comments will be lost on anyone who does not already knows a good deal about, say, Chinese imperial administration, religious practices, or literary canons. Third, as a result, he fails to make his point. For example, the chapter on Movement suggests Ming cultural artifacts show movement as central to Chinese self-representation. But because this is given no or little context, the reader is left with a collection of objects, each wrapped in its highfalutin gloss, without an explanation as to why the concept was unique to China. Movement is key to a great variety of art, from sixth-century Sassanid Persia to twentieth-century Italian modernist painting. Why Ming China? And Clunas concludes the chapter with the statement that immobility was just as important to Ming culture.
Some chapters have a little more structure, such as that on texts. But even then, Clunas's pompous and convoluted writing gets in the way. As a sample, he writes (page 60): 'As Francesca Bray has pointed out in a subtle study of the house as a technology for producing gender power through spatial disposition in late imperial China, the Chinese categories of "inner" and "outer" are not so much distinct, exclusive domains as boundaries shifting along a continuum. That is to say they are again relative, not absolute.' In other words, in plain English: Chinese ladies sometimes went out of their house.
Nor, finally, does Empire of Great Brightness give any sense of chronological change, of the rise and fall of Ming splendour and industry. Of course, the appropriate caveat is made in the introduction that things change and culture is never stable, but that is all. Clunas's book might appeal to the Ming China specialist, and it might work as a coffee table book thanks to its illustrations, but this is not for the general reader, and I suspect even the student will struggle to take away very much from it.
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