Social
Obligations and Scholar Painters
Elegant Debts: The Social Art of Wen Zhengming by Craig Clunas takes an
innovative approach to one of the great figures of Chinese culture, the writer
and painter Wen Zhengming (1470-1559). Renowned as one of the great “scholar
painters” of the Ming dynasty, Wen was enmeshed in a complex web of social
obligations, his “elegant debts” as he called them, which led to
many of his most celebrated works.
 Using an unprecedented quantity of primary sources for his life and work, this
UH Press book looks at the ways in which social obligation and gift exchange
were central to personal and individual identity in the Ming period. Elegant
Debts also examines Wen's family relationships, his friends, mentors and
pupils, his sense of a distinct local identity, and the interplay of national
and regional politics with the achievements of his long life. It uses the insights
of a range of scholarship—art history, social and literary history, and
anthropology—to show how “self” was constructed in Ming China.
In doing so, it makes a major contribution toward a more diverse art history
that is less dependent on European conceptions of artists and their work.
Clunas has published extensively in the field, and is widely
recognized as one of the world’s leading scholars of Ming culture. Featuring many images
of the work of one of China's major painters, this book is accessible to all
who are interested in China’s culture and history, as well as to students
and scholars of art history and the history of culture.
Elegant Debts: The Social Art of Wen Zhengming is available
from the UH
Press Web site.
—Text excerpted from the UH
Press Web site
UH
In Print
UH faculty and staff who had articles or other works published.
• Manoa Professor Jane
Moulin published “Words of Tomorrow: ‘Spectacle’ and
the Festival of Pacific Arts” in Pacific Arts.
• Manoa Associate
Professor David Chappell has
articles coming out in Journal de la Société des
Océanistes and Comparative Studies in Society and
History.
E-mail news about UH faculty and staff who have appeared In
Print to newsatuh@hawaii.edu.
|
