Professor Craig Clunas: List of publications

This is also a period when contacts of unprecedented scale took place between the Ming empire and the wider world, particularly between courts, through embassies, an aggressive military forward policy and court-sponsored maritime ...

In giving the very first lecture that first year History of Art undergraduates at Oxford will hear, I have usually employed the practice of giving them a sheet of paper with nothing on it but the outlines of the landmasses of the globe, and asking them to draw a line round ‘the West’. The idea was inspired by a reading of Lewis and Wigen’s 1997 book The Myth of Continents (‘justly celebrated’, as Sanjay Subrahmanyam says), and remains a useful pedagogic act up to a point, for the reasons so clearly laid out in that book; also, it breaks the ice, it gets a buzz of conversation going in the room, it certainly foregrounds the topic, central now to art historical enquiry, of the way in which ‘representations are social facts’. But the reason I do not ask them to draw a map round ‘the East’ is I suspect that it would be too easy, or at least done too quickly, and indeed the boundaries of both ‘East’ and ‘Orient’, as ‘Europe’s Other’, can be shown to have fluctuated much less than have the boundaries of what for most Oxford students is still, if somewhat tenuously, ‘us’ or ‘here’. Wherever ‘the East’ is, it all lies (as Subrahmanyam points out in his essay) in that assuredly etic part of the world called Asia. I might, in the privacy of my own hard drive, choose to categorise those European images which I need for teaching as ‘Non-Eastern’ (to balance the ‘Non-Western’ rubric on which my specialist options appear in the syllabus). But that is not a category widely used, or at least not in my own discipline of art history.

The engaging narrative is richly illustrated with over 250 images, drawing on the objects specially selected for the British Museum's major exhibition. Some of these are the finest pieces ever made in China.

Screen of Kings is the first book in any language to examine the cultural role of the regional aristocracy - relatives of the emperors - in Ming dynasty China (1368 - 1644). Through an analysis of their patronage of architecture, calligraphy, painting and other art forms, and through a study of the contents of their splendid and recently-excavated tombs, this innovative study puts the aristocracy back at the heart of accounts of China's culture, from which they have been excluded until very recently. Screen of Kings challenges much of the received wisdom about Ming China. Craig Clunas sheds new light on many familiar artworks, as well as work that have never before been reproduced. New archaeological discoveries have furnished the author with evidence of the lavish and spectacular lifestyles of these provincial princes and demonstrate how central the imperial family was to the high culture of the Ming era. Written by the leading specialist in the art and culture of the Ming period, this book will illuminate a key aspect of China's past, and will significantly alter our understanding of the Ming. It will be enjoyed by anyone with a serious interest in the history and art of this great civilization.

'Chinese art' is quite a recent invention, not much more than a hundred years old. Although the textiles, pieces of calligraphy, paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and other works of art shown in this book date from a period of 5,000 years, the idea ...

This was done crudely by using as a framework the number of times a particular quality is used in the 'Vessels and utensils' chapter of the Treatise on Superfluous Things. Any one of these terms merits a much more refined, subtle and ...