New Books

The Imperial Patronage of Labor Genre Paintings in Eighteenth-Century China

by Roslyn Lee Hammers

[Forthcoming] Routledge, 2021.

This book examines the agrarian labor genre paintings based on the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving that were commissioned by successive Chinese emperors.

This book analyzes the genre’s imagery and poems in their historical context, and explains how the paintings contributed to distinctively cosmopolitan Qing imagery that also drew upon European visual styles. Roslyn Lee Hammers argues that the technologically-informed imagery were not merely didactic imagery to teach viewers how to grow rice or produce silk. The Qing emperors invested in paintings of labor to substantiate the permanence of the dynasty and to promote the wellbeing of the people under Manchu governance. The book includes English translations of the poems of the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving as well as other documents that have not been brought together in translation.

ISBN: 9780367335687

Yoshitomo Nara

by Yeewan Koon

London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2020

Yoshitomo Nara rose to prominence in the mid-1990s, a star in a generation of avant-garde Japanese artists associated with the neo-Pop ‘Superflat’ movement. This book, made in close collaboration with Nara himself, explores more than three decades of his work – and is the first truly authoritative monograph on the artist in more than a decade. Written by art historian Yeewan Koon and featuring texts by Nara himself, it includes his most recent work in painting, drawing, sculpture, and ceramics.

ISBN: 9780714879949

>> Watch the book launch recording (10 June 2020, 6:30pm)
>> Conversation with Mika Yoshitake (16 October 2020, 8am)