This is the most comprehensive English-language compilation available on Chinese painters and their works from the late sixth through the mid- fourteenth century. Incorporating the work of Ellen Johnson Laing and Osvald Siren, the Index includes biographical details of the artists, their style and studio names.

Beyond Representation surveys Chinese painting and calligraphy from the eighth to the fourteenth century, a period during which Chinese society and artistic expression underwent profound changes. A fourteenth-century Yuan dynasty (1279 - 1368) literati landscape painting presents a world that is totally different from that portrayed in the monumental landscape images of the early Sung dynasty (960 - 1279). To chronicle and explain the evolution from formal representation to self-expression is the purpose of this book. Wen C. Fong, one of the world's most eminent scholars of Chinese art, takes the reader through this evolution, drawing on the outstanding collection of Chinese painting and calligraphy in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Focusing on 118 works, each illustrated in full color, the book significantly augments the standard canon of images used to describe the period, enhancing our sense of the richness and complexity of artistic expression during this six-hundred-year era.

In Painting Architecture: Jiehua in Yuan China, 1271–1368, Leqi Yu has conducted comprehensive research on jiehua or ruled-line painting, a unique painting genre in fourteenth-century China. This genre relies on tools such as rulers to represent architectural details and structures accurately. Such technical consideration and mechanical perfection linked this painting category with the builder’s art, which led to Chinese elites’ belittlement and won Mongol patrons’ admiration. Yu suggests that painters in the Yuan dynasty made new efforts towards a unique modular system and an unsurpassable plain-drawing tradition. She argues that these two strategies made architectural paintings in the Yuan dynasty entirely different from their predecessors, as well as making the art form extremely difficult for subsequent painters to imitate. “Architecture has been a subject of Chinese painting for two millennia, but has remained elusive. Painting Architecture explains the reasons as well as why the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries are pivotal. The book also translates the vast writings on architectural painting, places the paintings in historical context, and assesses the relation between the paintings and actual buildings. The superior scholarship and original interpretation ensure that paintings of architecture will be part of future discourse about Chinese painting.” —Nancy Steinhardt, professor, University of Pennsylvania “Focusing on the development of jiehua in the fourteenth century when the Mongols ruled China, Yu’s book raises issues beyond the field of painting history, including architectural history, aesthetics, and social-historical studies. It is a long-awaited contribution to a rarely studied painting genre and an admirable accomplishment of multidisciplinary research on Chinese art.” —Qianshen Bai, associate professor emeritus, Boston University