A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture

• Brings together top international scholars of Asian art and architecture
• Represents the current state of the field while highlighting the wide range of scholarly approaches to Asian Art 
• Features work on Korea and Southeast Asia, two regions often overlooked in a field that is often defined as India-China-Japan
• Explores the influences on Asian art of global and colonial interactions and of the diasporic communities in the US and UK
• Showcases a wide range of topics including imperial commissions, ancient tombs, gardens, monastic spaces, performances, and pilgrimages.

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).

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 Viewing through Material Analysis, Ethnographic Analogy, and Architectural History 23
Kevin Gray Carr

3 Textiles and Social Action in Theravada Buddhist Thailand 48
Leedom Lefferts

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

5 The Visible and the Invisible in a Southeast Asian World 97
Jan Mrázek

Part III Space 121

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

7 Urban Space and Visual Culture: The Transformation of Seoul in the 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 Us about Rukn-ud-Din? 233
Molly Emma Aitken and Shanane Davis, with technical analysis by Yana van Dyke

11 Convergent Conversations: Contemporary Art in Asian America 264
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” Sind 365
Finbarr Barry Flood

16 In the Absence of the Buddha: “Aniconism” and the Contentions 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 Java 486
Kaja M. McGowan

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

22 In the Name of the Nation: Song Painting and Artistic Discourse 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 Sculptures in Japan 580
Sherry Fowler

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

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

Index 655

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