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Chinese Toggles

Culture in Miniature

By Shuxia Chen, Min-Jung Kim

Rare objects from one of the world's only major collections

This book introduces the understudied cultural artifact of the Chinese belt toggle, known as zhuizi (坠子). Similar to their better-known Japanese counterparts, netsuke, these small carved...

India's Mithila Painting

By David L. Szanton, Paula Richman

A woman's art form transforms from home to high art

Since at least the fifteenth century, Hindu women in the Mithila region of northern India have been painting images of deities, flora and fauna symbolizing fertility...

Bronze Mirrors in Ancient China

Artistry and Technique

By Kin Sum Li

Examines mass production in antiquity

Highly decorated mirrors are widely sought by museums with collections of Chinese art and are the most actively exchanged items in the art market of ancient Chinese bronzes. Featuring intricate designs...

Salon Culture in Japan

Making Art, 1750–1900

By Akiko Yano

Celebrates the British Museum's rich collection of artworks created as part of Japanese cultural salons

In early modern Japan, cultural salons were creative spaces for people of all ages and social levels to pursue painting, poetry,...

Glorious Qing

Decorative Arts in China, 1644-1911

By Claudia Brown

A guided tour through centuries of exquisitely crafted objects

With over 250 color illustrations, this companion volume to Claudia Brown's Great Qing: Painting in China, 1644–1911 covers an array of superbly crafted objects of art produced...

Life and Afterlife in Ancient China

By Jessica Rawson

The three millennia up to the establishment of the first imperial Qin dynasty in 221 BC cemented many of the distinctive elements of Chinese civilization still in place today: an extraordinarily challenging geography and environment;...

China's Hidden Century

1796-1912

By Jessica Harrison-Hall, Julia Lovell

Cultural creativity in China between 1796 and 1912 demonstrated extraordinary resilience in a time of warfare, land shortages, famine, and uprisings. Innovation can be seen in material culture (including print, painting, calligraphy, textiles, jewelry, ceramics,...

Renegade Edo and Paris

Japanese Prints and Toulouse-Lautrec

By Xiaojin Wu. With Contributions by Mary Weaver Chapin

A critical look at the renegade spirit that permeates Japanese prints and the posters of fin-de-siècle Paris

Both the Edo period (1603–1868) in Japan and the late nineteenth century in France witnessed a multitude of challenges...

The Brush of Insight

Artists and Agency at the Mughal Court

By Yael Rice

Sheds light on the art and artists that gave material form to Mughal imperial vision

Over the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Mughal court painters evolved from illustrators of manuscripts and albums to...

The Ghost in the City

Luo Ping and the Craft of Painting in Eighteenth-Century China

By Michele Matteini

A visual and social exploration of early modern Beijing's cultural milieu

In 1771 the artist Luo Ping (1733–99) left his native Yangzhou to relocate to the burgeoning hub of Beijing's Southern City. Over two decades, he...

Old Stacks, New Leaves

The Arts of the Book in South Asia

By Sonal Khullar

A deep dive into the visual forms, material contexts, social lives, and global circulations of books

In the twenty-first century, debates on the future of books and print culture have intensified with the rise of digital...

Porcelain for the Emperor

Manufacture and Technocracy in Qing China

By Kai Jun Chen

A new perspective for understanding the technology behind goods “made in China”

The exquisite ceramic ware produced at the Imperial Porcelain Manufactory at Jingdezhen in southern China functioned as a kind of visual propaganda for the...

Spatial Dunhuang

Experiencing the Mogao Caves

By Wu Hung

Constructed over a millennium from the fourth to fourteenth centuries CE near Dunhuang, an ancient border town along the Silk Road in northwest China, the Mogao Caves comprise the largest, most continuously created, and best-preserved...

Lahore Cinema

Between Realism and Fable

By Iftikhar Dadi

A pioneering analysis of exemplary feature films

Commercial cinema has been among the most powerful vectors of social and aesthetic modernization in South Asia. So argues Iftikhar Dadi in his provocative examination of cinema produced between...

The Many Lives of the First Emperor of China

By Anthony J. Barbieri-Low

Tyrant or national hero? An interdisciplinary exploration of China's First Emperor

Ying Zheng, founder of the Qin empire, is recognized as a pivotal figure in world history, alongside other notable conquerors such as Alexander the Great,...

Temples in the Cliffside

Buddhist Art in Sichuan

By Sonya S. Lee

Winner of the 2023 IPPY – Gold – Religion Nonfiction category, sponsored by the Independent Publisher Book Award

Centuries of monumental sculpture, embedded in the landscape

At sixty-two meters the Leshan Buddha in southwest China is...

Carving Status at Kŭmgangsan

Elite Graffiti in Premodern Korea

By Maya K. H. Stiller

Honorable Mention for the 2024 James B. Palais Prize for English-Language Scholarly books published on Korea from the Association for Asian Studies

Winner of the 2022 Patricia Buckley Ebrey Prize sponsored by the American Historical Association

An...

The City in Time

Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia

By Pamela N. Corey

Illuminates how the city has shaped contemporary artistic practice in Southeast Asia

In The City in Time, Pamela N. Corey provides new ways of understanding contemporary artistic practices in a region that continues to linger in...

Artisans in Early Imperial China

By Anthony J. Barbieri-Low

An award-winning study of the ancient world, now back in print

Early China is best known for the dazzling material artifacts it has left behind. These terracotta figures, gilt-bronze lamps, and other material remnants of the...

Opening Kailasanatha

The Temple in Kanchipuram Revealed in Time and Space

By Padma Kaimal

The footsteps and sensory experience of devotees linger in an Indian temple

Stone figures hardened by ascetic discipline and heroic effort face north in deep shadow. There they meet the gazes of the same gods and...