Hsiu-Chang Deppman puts landmark contemporary Chinese films in the context of their literary origins & explores how the best Chinese directors adapt fictional narratives & styles for film.

In the first exploration of Chinese paintings as both material products and pictorial representations, The Double Screen shows how the collaboration and tension between material form and image gives life to a painting. A Chinese painting is often reduced to the image it bears; its material form is dismissed; its intimate connection with social activities and cultural conventions neglected. A screen occupies a space and divides it, supplies an ideal surface for painting, and has been a favorite pictorial image in Chinese art since antiquity. Wu Hung undertakes a comprehensive analysis of the screen, which can be an object, an art medium, a pictorial motif, or all three at once. With its diverse roles, the screen has provided Chinese painters with endless opportunities to reinvent their art. The Double Screen provides a powerful non-Western perspective on issues from portraiture and pictorial narrative to voyeurism, masquerade, and political rhetoric. It will be invaluable to anyone interested in the history of art and Asian studies.

On a Chinese Screen was first published in 1922 by Heinemann Publishers, London. Its 58 short vignettes are based on Maugham’s travels along the Yangtze River from 1919 to 1920. Although later editions of the book added the subtitle “Sketches of Life in China,” there are actually only a few descriptions of the places he visited and the local Chinese people he met; rather, Maugham focuses on relaying his encounters with a range of Europeans living and working in the country. Maugham is quite critical of many of them and their lack of interest in, and sometimes disdain, for the country and its people, except for the extent to which their careers and pockets could benefit. His sketches highlight the difficulties that many expatriates encounter while living in a foreign culture. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

On a Chinese Screen, also known as On a Chinese Screen: Sketches of Life in China, is a travel book by W. Somerset Maugham, first published in 1922.

ON A CHINESE SCREEN is a sequence of remarkable vignettes of Europeans residents in China just after the First World War -Westerners culturally out of their depth in the immensity of the Chinese civilisation. Somerset Maugham, who travelled over a thousand miles up the Yangtse river, used his acerbic and insightful notes to write this fascinating book.