Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West examines how the contact between China and Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries transformed the arts on both sides of the East- West divide. The essays in the volume reveal the extent to which images, artifacts, and natural specimens were traded and copied, and how these materials inflected both cultures’ visions of novelty and pleasure, battle and power, and ways of seeing and representing. Artists and craftspeople on both continents borrowed and adapted forms, techniques, and modes of representation, producing deliberate, meaningful, and complex new creations. By considering this reciprocity from both Eastern and Western perspectives, Qing Encounters offers a new and nuanced understanding of this critical period.
Petra ten-Doesschate Chu is professor of art history and museum studies and director of graduate studies in Museum Professions at Seton Hall University. Ning Ding is professor of art history and theory and vice-dean at the School of Arts, Peking University.
“Beautifully illustrated. . . . [This volume] offers a serious treatment of . . . a complex problem through the diversity of the methodologies and perspectives adopted by its contributors.”
—New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century
“If modernity can be considered in terms of intensified transcultural exchanges, the volume helps to reset its origins for China and the West to at least one hundred years before the accustomed chronology. . . . Overcoming the traditional bias towards the “fine arts” in art-historical writing, volume moves easily between painting, print, architecture, textiles, interior decoration and technical instruments.”
—Burlington Magazine
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