Monday, June 7, 2010

Flowering in the Shadows: Women in the History of Chinese and Japanese Painting

Edited by Marsha Weidner
online access from EBSCOhost Ebooks
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It is common to read the histories of the arts of China and Japan without encountering mention of women. I myself have been teaching East Asian art history for over twenty years, and have usually done so without ever discussing a single female artist. If questioned by my students, I might provide a name or two, usually that of Kuan Tao-sheng (1262―1319), the wife of Chao Meng-fu, the foremost painter and calligrapher of the early Yuan period. Basically, art historians have regarded the art of China and Japan as a patriarchal tradition, allowing for the occasional wife or concubine to appear briefly, but attending to the essential male identity of the East Asian cultural tradition.
That this long practice is false and unacceptable is evident. As this volume demonstrates, not only were there many women active as artists in both China and Japan throughtout history, there were women in both tradtions whose stature and influence should be regarded as central to the long vitality of East Asian art. Moreover, no evaluation or understanding of the artistic , cultural, and philosophical traditions of China and Japan is really possible without comprehension of the feminine components that have shaped and influenced the whole …
(Excerpt from the Foreword by Richard Barnhart)

中國繪畫收藏與鑑賞全書

劉國生 主编
online access from China Reference Works Online
online access from SuperStar Digital Library
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全書內容共分繪畫發展歷程、三大畫科源流、中國畫技法形式、風格與流派、中國畫的工具、中國畫的鑑定、中國繪畫的投資與收藏,凡六篇計一百多萬字,收集繪畫作品一千多幅,並對國畫藝術品市場動態作了簡明的介紹,以便於讀者全面掌握各個時期繪畫珍品的辨偽辨仿、收藏鑑賞以及保養知識,具有較高的實用性和可讀性。
(摘錄自前言)

Monday, May 31, 2010

The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity

Edited by Mark Turner
online access from ProQuest Ebook Central

All normal human beings alive in the last fifty thousand years appear to have possessed, in Mark Turner's phrase, "irrepressibly artful minds." Cognitively modern minds produced a staggering list of behavioral singularities--science, religion, mathematics, language, advanced tool use, decorative dress, dance, culture, art--that seems to indicate a mysterious and unexplained discontinuity between us and all other living things. This brute fact gives rise to some tantalizing questions: How did the artful mind emerge? What are the basic mental operations that make art possible for us now, and how do they operate? These are the questions that occupy the distinguished contributors to this volume, which emerged from a year-long Getty-funded research project hosted by the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. These scholars bring to bear a range of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives on the relationship between art (broadly conceived), the mind, and the brain. Together they hope to provide directions for a new field of research that can play a significant role in answering the great riddle of human singularity.
(Excerpt from the Publisher’s description)

丹青聖手:黃公望王蒙吳鎮傳

壽勤澤 著
online access from Apabi
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本書介紹黃公望(1269-1354)、王蒙(1308-1385)、吳鎮(1280-1354),三位元明之際浙江丹青聖手的生平事跡和藝術成就。

…… 伍爾芙(Virginia Woolf) [英國現代派文學大家]是一位以極其嚴謹的創作態度對待個人 “文字” 的作家,她把自己嘔心瀝血的創作過程名之曰“生命寫 作”,當她的寫作宣告結束之日,也是她生命之火熄滅的一天。她的“生命寫作”,成為世界文學史上最為奇麗絢爛的風景線,深受後人的敬仰。作一個時空大跨越的比較,黃公望畫《富春山居圖》,歷經7個寒暑而成;王蒙繪就《青卞隱居圖》,密線繁體,足見匠心獨運;吳鎮圖寫《漁父圖》,同一題材,情有所鍾,反覆創作,留下精品力作。他們雖然與伍爾芙生活於不同的時間和空間,但在文藝創作的本質精神上則是完全相通的。
“元四家”生活於同一個時代,又生活於江南地區,相互之間又有密切的交往,思想與藝術上互有影響。為“元四家”立傳,最理想的是將黃公望、王蒙、吳鎮、倪瓚四人的傳記合為一 書,便於從宏觀視野裡對他們作多層面、多角度的比較論評,使讀者更清晰地看到元代文人畫發展的脈絡肌理。例如,‟元四家”將山水畫推向中國山水畫史的高峰,倪瓚的“逸筆草草,不求形似”論是最需要作出深入的學理分析的,然而,限於叢書[《浙江文化名人傳記叢書》]早就確定的選收體例,倪瓚籍貫江蘇,就無法收進這部書稿 ……
(摘錄自本書作者後記)

Monday, May 24, 2010

Shanghai and the Edges of Empires

By Meng Yue
online access from ProQuest Ebook Central
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Even before the romanticized golden era of Shanghai in the 1930s, the famed Asian city was remarkable for its uniqueness and East-meets-West cosmopolitanism. Meng Yue analyzes a century-long shift of urbanity from China’s heartland to its shore. During the period between the decline of Jiangnan cities such as Suzhou and Yangzhou and Shanghai’s early twentieth-century rise, the overlapping cultural edges of a failing Chinese royal order and the encroachment of Western imperialists converged. Simultaneously appropriating and resisting imposing forces, Shanghai opened itself to unruly, subversive practices, becoming a crucible of creativity and modernism.
Calling into question conventional ways of conceptualizing modernity, colonialism, and intercultural relations, Meng Yue examines such cultural practices as the work of the commercial press, street theater, and literary arts, and shows that what appear to be minor cultural changes often signal the presence of larger political and economic developments. Engaging theories of modernity and postcolonial and global cultural studies, Meng Yue reveals the paradoxical interdependence between imperial and imperialist histories and the retranslation of culture that characterized the most notable result of China’s urban relocation—the emergence of the international city of Shanghai.
(Excerpt from amazon.com)

說服力 : 令人心悦誠服的說話技巧 = Conviction

趙彥鋒 著
online access from iRead eBook

說服已成為我們建立和諧人際關係的重要關鍵。說服是一門藝術,更是一個人綜合素質的具體體現。在日常生活中要想因某事而說服某人,就必須掌握一些說服的技巧和法則。
說話要注意場合。不看場合,隨心所欲,信口開河,想到什麼說什麼,這是「不會說話」的一種拙劣表現。
會說話的人一般都是成熟穩重的,特別是身處窘境時,能夠巧妙地以言語化解自己的尷尬境地。
(摘錄自博客來網路書店)