From the early twentieth century until the Communist takeover in 1949, Shanghai commercial artists created thousands of colorful posters and black and white advertisements that formed an essential part of modern life in the city. This visually appealing and richly illustrated work describes the origin and evolution of modern commercial art in China, focusing on colorful advertisement calendar posters that featured distinctive feminine images. It makes clear how essential commercial art and its institutional backing were to the development of modern art and even modern society in China over the past century. Selling Happiness discusses not only advertising art but also the production and marketing of the calendar poster. These posters, like other advertisements, were rendered in a Western realistic technique and were wildly and widely popular. Ordinary people throughout China often acquired them to decorate their homes. Laing outlines how the Chinese commercial artist, who rarely attended formal Western art classes, gained skills in Western representational art. In the final chapter of the book, she explains how the styles developed by the commercial poster artists during the 1920s and 1930s became the basis for certain types of propaganda art under the Chinese Communists in the 1950s and 1960s.

This is the most comprehensive English-language compilation available on Chinese painters and their works from the late sixth through the mid- fourteenth century. Incorporating the work of Ellen Johnson Laing and Osvald Siren, the Index includes biographical details of the artists, their style and studio names.

In the second half of the twentieth century, studies in Chinese painting history have been greatly aided by several major lists of Chinese artists and their works. Published between 1956 and 1980, these lists were limited to Imperial China. The current index covers the period from 1912 to around 1980. It includes the names of approximately 3,500 traditional-style artists along with lists of their works, reproduced in some 264 monographs, books, journals, and catalogs published from the 1920s to around 1980. With a few exceptions, artists working after 1949 outside continental China are excluded. Revised Edition, 1998; first published by the Asian Studies Program, University of Oregon, 1984.

This bibliography includes publications issued between 1956 and August 1968 that reproduce Chinese paintings now in Chinese public or private collections. The great majority of these publications were produced in Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Japan. Each publication included in the bibliography has been provided with a detailed physical description of the publication itself: the amounts of text , the number of plates in color and in monochrome, and a general evaluation of the quality of the reproductions. The title by which each work is referred to in the index is included at the end of each entry.

This comprehensive study of the traditional Chinese craft of paper sculpture documents the ancient craft as it exists today in Taiwan.

This book begins with the understanding that, in addition to its aesthetic qualities, Asian art and material artifacts are expressive of cultural realities and constitute a "visible language" with messages that can be read, interpreted, and analyzed. Asian art and artifacts are understood in their contexts, as "windows" into cultures, and as such can be used as a powerful pedagogical tool in many academic disciplines. The book includes essays by scholars of Asian art, philosophy, anthropology, and religion that focus on objects held in ASIANetwork schools. The ASIANetwork collections are reflective of Asian societies, historical and religious environments, political positions, and economic conditions. The art objects and artifacts were discovered sometimes in storage and were sometimes poorly understood and variously described as fine art, curiosities, souvenirs, and markers of events in a school's history. The chapter authors tell the stories of the collections, and the collections themselves tell stories of the collectors. This volume is intended for use in many disciplines, and its interpretive structures are adaptable to other examples of art and artifacts in other colleges, universities, and museums. An online database of some 2000 art objects held in the ASIANetwork schools' collections supplements this book.

Traditional woodblock prints preserve a Chinese folk art that has now nearly vanished. This book explores and explains the artistic and aesthetic bases of popular prints revealed in eighty-four late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century prints belonging to the London-based Muban Foundation. Woodblock printing was the principal method of producing inexpensive and colorful single-sheet images for mass consumption in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China. Prints of this type are known today as "New Year pictures" because the demand for them peaked at New Year's time. However, the term "popular print" more accurately describes these works, whose subjects include deities and tutelary spirits, illustrations to stories and operas, and even contemporary political or revolutionary messages. The emphasis on the artistic aspects of these prints makes this publication uniquely appealing to Chinese art historians but also to those interested in Chinese anthropology, popular religion, Chinese and other folk art, and traditional crafts. Ellen J. Laing received a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. She was Maude I. Kerns Distinguished Professor of Oriental Art, University of Oregon and is currently Research Associate at the Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan. She has published numerous scholarly articles, books, and reference works on Chinese art.

This bibliography includes publications issued between 1956 and August 1968 that reproduce Chinese paintings now in Chinese public or private collections. The great majority of these publications were produced in Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Japan. Each publication included in the bibliography has been provided with a detailed physical description of the publication itself: the amounts of text , the number of plates in color and in monochrome, and a general evaluation of the quality of the reproductions. The title by which each work is referred to in the index is included at the end of each entry.