China Obscura

Author :
Publisher : Chronicle Books
ISBN 13 : 9780811844611
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book China Obscura written by and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2004-08-12 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arriving in mainland China by chance just a day after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, young Chinese-American photographer Mark Leong was compelled to stay and explore with his camera's lens the fascinating contradictions of a rapidly changing but still intensely traditional Chinese society. Living in Beijing and traveling across China for the past fifteen years, he has captured images that astonish with their power and with his unprecedented access to both official and underground Chinese culture. This is a China rarely seen, where schoolchildren learn the tenets of Mao and an addict sifts heroin on a bill bearing the Chairman's benevolent likeness; where nervous stockbrokers carry handguns and teenage rollerbladers hope for fame and financial sponsorship. In more than 150 photographs, with a foreword by noted Chinese poet Yang Lian and an afterword by author Peter Hessler, China Obscura is an intimate and exquisitely detailed portrait of a society accelerating toward an uncertain future, precariously straddled between old and new.

Author : Lingzhen Wang
Publisher : Duke University Press Books
ISBN 13 : 9781478010807
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Revisiting Women's Cinema written by Lingzhen Wang and published by Duke University Press Books. This book was released on 2021-01-22 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Revisiting Women’s Cinema, Lingzhen Wang ponders the roots of contemporary feminist stagnation and the limits of both commercial mainstream and elite minor cultures by turning to socialist women filmmakers in modern China. She foregrounds their sociopolitical engagements, critical interventions, and popular artistic experiments, offering a new conception of socialist and postsocialist feminisms, mainstream culture, and women’s cinema. Wang highlights the films of Wang Ping and Dong Kena in the 1950s and 1960s and Zhang Nuanxin and Huang Shuqin in the 1980s and 1990s to unveil how they have been profoundly misread through extant research paradigms entrenched in Western Cold War ideology, post-second-wave cultural feminism, and post-Mao intellectual discourses. Challenging received interpretations, she elucidates how socialist feminism and culture were conceptualized and practiced in relation to China’s search not only for national independence and economic development but also for social emancipation, proletarian culture, and socialist internationalism. Wang calls for a critical reevaluation of historical materialism, socialist feminism, and popular culture to forge an integrated emancipatory vision for future transnational feminist and cultural practices.

Author : Bianca Bosker
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
ISBN 13 : 0824837835
Total Pages : 178 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Original Copies written by Bianca Bosker and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2013-01-31 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 108-meter high Eiffel Tower rises above Champs Elysées Square in Hangzhou. A Chengdu residential complex for 200,000 recreates Dorchester, England. An ersatz Queen’s Guard patrols Shanghai’s Thames Town, where pubs and statues of Winston Churchill abound. Gleaming replicas of the White House dot Chinese cities from Fuyang to Shenzhen. These examples are but a sampling of China’s most popular and startling architectural movement: the construction of monumental themed communities that replicate towns and cities in the West. Original Copies presents the first definitive chronicle of this remarkable phenomenon in which entire townships appear to have been airlifted from their historic and geographic foundations in Europe and the Americas, and spot-welded to Chinese cities. These copycat constructions are not theme parks but thriving communities where Chinese families raise children, cook dinners, and simulate the experiences of a pseudo-Orange County or Oxford. In recounting the untold and evolving story of China’s predilection for replicating the greatest architectural hits of the West, Bianca Bosker explores what this unprecedented experiment in “duplitecture” implies for the social, political, architectural, and commercial landscape of contemporary China. With her lively, authoritative narrative, the author shows us how, in subtle but important ways, these homes and public spaces shape the behavior of their residents, as they reflect the achievements, dreams, and anxieties of those who inhabit them, as well as those of their developers and designers. From Chinese philosophical perspectives on copying to twenty-first century market forces, Bosker details the factors giving rise to China’s new breed of building. Her analysis draws on insights from the world’s leading architects, critics and city planners, and on interviews with the residents of these developments.

Author : Oliver Moore
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000182479
Total Pages : 405 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Photography in China written by Oliver Moore and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-24 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emphasizing the medium’s reception among several Chinese constituencies, this book explores photography’s impact within new discourses on science, as well as its effects in social life, visual modernity and the media during China’s transition from imperial to republican government. General knowledge and academic teaching of early modern Chinese visual culture stops short of fitting photography into the larger context of visual practices and theories. This study redraws the boundaries by making photography the central concern within changing priorities of visual representation and its functions during a period of major cultural and political change. No other study draws on such intimate familiarity with the early glamour of photography as science, commerce and communication in the various local conditions of China’s cities and towns. Joining a body of critical writing that examines photography’s histories outside the familiar confines of the West, this book looks beyond the tourist and imperialist gazes of photographer-adventurers from the Western powers and Japan. It defines instead the Chinese priorities of photographic vision that are abundantly evident in surviving photographs as well as in records as various as technical manuals and personal inscriptions. Local practices and local knowledge are the keys to explain the highly successful indigenization of a medium as globalizing as photography with reference to Chinese society’s own terms and practices. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in art and visual culture, the history of photography and Asian art.

Author : Kenneth James Hammond
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 9780742554665
Total Pages : 220 pages
Book Rating : 4.6X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Human Tradition in Modern China written by Kenneth James Hammond and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2008 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lively and engaging text offers a panorama of modern Chinese history through compelling biographies of the famous and obscure. Spanning five hundred years, they include a Ming dynasty medical pioneer, a Qing dynasty courtesan, a nineteenth-century Hong Kong business leader, a Manchu princess, an arsenal manager, a woman soldier, and a young maid in contemporary Beijing. Through the lives of these diverse people, readers will gain an understanding of the complex questions of modern Chinese history: What did it mean to be Chinese, and how did that change over time? How was learning encouraged and directed in imperial and post-imperial China? Was it possible to challenge entrenched gender roles? What effects did European imperialism have on Chinese lives? How did ordinary Chinese experience the warfare and political upheaval of twentieth-century China? What is the nature of the gap between urban and rural China in the post-Mao years? These richly researched biographies are written in an accessible and appealing style that will engage all readers interested in modern China. Contributions by: Daria Berg, John M. Carroll, Kenneth J. Hammond, Joshua H. Howard, Fabio Lanza, Oliver Moore, Pan Yihong, Hugh Shapiro, Kristin Stapleton, and Shuo Wang

Author : Jeffrey W. Cody
Publisher : Getty Publications
ISBN 13 : 1606060546
Total Pages : 212 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Brush & Shutter written by Jeffrey W. Cody and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2011 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accompanies an exhibition held at the J. Paul Getty Museum, 8 February-1 May 2011.

Author : Jerome Silbergeld
Publisher : Reaktion Books
ISBN 13 : 9781861890504
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book China Into Film written by Jerome Silbergeld and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 1999 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 1984, Chinese cinema has been the most dramatic entry onto the international film scene. China into Film is the first book to look at contemporary Chinese cinema as a visual art and to illustrate the ways in which it has been shaped by centuries of Chinese tradition. Jerome Silbergeld looks at the significance of gender roles, the strategies of film-makers in coping with state censorship, the translation of novels into films, the continuing attachment of film-makers to melodrama, and cinematic critiques of Maoism and post-Maoist culture. Abundantly illustrated with Chinese paintings as well as scenes from such internationally acclaimed films as Yellow Earth, Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern and Farewell My Concubine, China into Film reveals a cinematic form at once excitingly new and deeply imbedded in traditional Chinese visual culture.

Author : Christopher J. Berry
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231510306
Total Pages : 331 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book China on Screen written by Christopher J. Berry and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2006-04-04 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In China on Screen, Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, leaders in the field of Chinese film studies, explore more than one hundred years of Chinese cinema and nation. Providing new perspectives on key movements, themes, and filmmakers, Berry and Farquhar analyze the films of a variety of directors and actors, including Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, Hou Hsiao Hsien, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Maggie Cheung, Gong Li, Wong Kar-wai, and Ang Lee. They argue for the abandonment of "national cinema" as an analytic tool and propose "cinema and the national" as a more productive framework. With this approach, they show how movies from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora construct and contest different ideas of Chinese nation—as empire, republic, or ethnicity, and complicated by gender, class, style, transnationalism, and more. Among the issues and themes covered are the tension between operatic and realist modes, male and female star images, transnational production and circulation of Chinese films, the image of the good foreigner—all related to different ways of imagining nation. Comprehensive and provocative, China on Screen is a crucial work of film analysis.

Author : Frances K. Gateward
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781578062614
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Zhang Yimou written by Frances K. Gateward and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eleven years of interviews with the acclaimed Chinese film director of such movies as Red Sorgham, Shanghai Triad, and Not One Less

Author : Tomás Prower
Publisher : Llewellyn Worldwide
ISBN 13 : 0738760625
Total Pages : 318 pages
Book Rating : 4.29/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Morbid Magic written by Tomás Prower and published by Llewellyn Worldwide. This book was released on 2019-09-08 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ultimate Book on Macabre Lore & Spiritual Traditions from Yesterday & Today Written with a mix of reverence, approachability, and deadpan wit by a funeral industry insider, Morbid Magic is the first multi-cultural guide to death spirituality and traditions from all over the world and from different historical eras. Tomás Prower presents an impressive array of topics, including each culture's views on the hereafter, mourning periods, the deceased's legacy, handling of remains, and more. Discover the lore and magic of death, both on the physical and spiritual planes. Explore hands-on activities, spells, and prayers that will open your eyes to new practices. Experience personal stories and anecdotes by modern people from various regions and religions. This fascinating book makes death a more approachable topic and helps you understand and utilize the profound wisdom of cultures around the globe. From Judaism in the Middle East to shamanism in East Asia, Morbid Magic presents an amazing, in-depth look at how the world deals with death.