Discusses furniture silver laqcuerware ivory figures fans and wall-paper.

Drawing on the British Museum's extensive collection, this book explores the traditional hierarchy of materials and techniques reaching back as far as the Han Dynasty in the third century BC. In the history and character of the works under scrutiny, this sumptuously illustrated book conveys an understanding of Chinese art in all its great variety.

The Chinese art collection in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is one of the finest outside East Asia, with particularly superb holdings of paintings and ceramics, along with important sculptures, bronzes and examples of the decorative arts. Some 100 objects have been selected here to represent its riches, arranged to explore themes such as religion or the scholar tradition throughout China's long history. The works featured in Arts of China range from Neolithic tomb artifacts to contemporary painting and include exquisite porcelains, paintings, sculptures, lacquerware and metalwork created for worship, court life, foreign trade or everyday use. Many reflect engagement with earlier traditions or with cultures outside China, including those of Central Asia and India as well as Europe and America. Enhanced with illuminating essays, this book offers an ideal introduction to the breathtaking beauty and variety of Chinese art.

With Sensuous Surfaces, Jonathan Hay offers one of the most richly illustrated and in-depth introductions to the decorative arts of Ming and Qing dynasty China to date. Examining an immense number of works, he explores the materials and techniques, as well as the effects of patronage and taste, that together have formed a loose system of informal rules that define the decorative arts in early modern China. Hay demonstrates how this system—by engaging the actual and metaphorical potential of surface—guided the production and use of decorative arts from the late sixteenth century through the middle of the nineteenth, a period of explosive growth. He shows how the understanding of decorative arts made a fundamental contribution to the sensory education of China’s early modern urban population. Enriching his study with 280 color plates, he ultimately offers an elegant meditation, not only on Ming and Qing art but on the importance of the erotic in the form and function of decorations of all eras.

Chinese Antiquities: An Introduction to the Art Market provides an essential guide to the growing market for Chinese antiquities, encompassing all sectors of the market, from Classical Chinese paintings and calligraphy to ceramics, jade, bronze and ritual sculpture. Aimed at current and aspiring collectors, investors and galleries interested in Chinese antiquities, the book sets out to demystify the process of buying and selling in the Asian context, highlighting Asia-specific issues that market-players might encounter and making this category of art more accessible to newcomers to the market.