Transformative jars
Subtitle: Asian ceramic vessels as transcultural enclosures
By: edited by Anna Grasskamp
Edition: 1st ed.
Series: Material Culture of Art and Design
Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Published: 2022
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
ISBN-13: 9781350277465
Subjects: Material culture; Pottery, ceramics & glass crafts
Description: The term 'jar' refers to any man-made shape with the capacity to enclose something. Few objects are as universal and multi-functional as a jar - regardless of whether they contain food or drink, matter or a void, life-giving medicine or the ashes of the deceased. As ubiquitous as they may seem, such containers, storage vessels and urns are, as this book demonstrates, highly significant cultural and historical artefacts that mediate between content and environment, exterior worlds and interior enclosures, local and global, this-worldly and otherworldly realms.    The contributors to this volume understand jars not only as household utensils or evidence of human civilizations, but also as artefacts in their own right. Asian jars are culturally and aesthetically defined crafted goods and as objects charged with spiritual meanings and ritual significance. Transformative Jars situates Asian jars in a global context and focuses on relationships between the filling, emptying and re-filling of jars with a variety of contents and meanings through time and throughout space.    Transformative Jars brings together an interdisciplinary team of scholars with backgrounds in curating, art history and anthropology to offer perspectives that go beyond archaeological approaches with detailed analyses of a broad range of objects. By looking at jars as things in the hands of makers, users and collectors, this book presents these objects as agents of change in cultures of craftsmanship and consumption..
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Table of contents: title: List of Contributors List of Illustrations  Transformative Jars: An Introduction  Anna Grasskamp, University of St Andrews, UK; title: Anne Gerritsen, University of Warwick, UK, and Leiden University, Netherlands  Part I. Transformative Matters: Ceramic Vessels, Chemistry and Socio-Economic Change  Chapter 1. Dreams of Transformation: A 14th-century Flask from Cizhou  Anne Gerritsen, University of Warwick and Leiden University Chapter 2. Jars that Cheered: Alcohol and Stoneware Containers in Java before 1500  Jiri Jakl, University of Heidelberg  Part II. Transformative Spaces: Ceramic Vessels and Asian Locations  Chapter 3. Siamese Jars and their Significance in Southeast-Asian Trade from the 14th to the 18th Century Atthasit Sukkham, Bangkok University Chapter 4. Weaving Networks: Production and Exchange of Ceramic Jars in South China and Vietnam from the 14th to the 16th Century Wong Wai-yee Sharon, Chinese University of Hong Kong  Part III. Transcultural Enclosures: Containers and their Contents in Global Context  Chapter 5. For Oil, Date Syrup and the Tomb of a Chinese Queen: The Reciprocal Trade in Chinese and West Asian Jars in the Late Tang/Early Abbasid Periods Eva Strober, Curator Emerita, National Museum of Ceramics Princessehof Leeuwarden  Chapter 6. Translocation and Transformation: The Lives of Chinese Fishbowls in the Early Modern Period  Wen-ting Wu, National Taiwan University  Part IV. Transformative Containers: Individual Jars and Modes of Agency Chapter 7. The Jars Have Ears: Circulation and Proliferation of Chinese Prototype Container Jars and their Offspring in Asia  Louise Cort, Curator Emerita for Ceramics, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution Chapter 8. Dragons in Flux: A Changing Relationship between People and Jars in the Kelabit Highlands, Borneo, from the 19th to the 21st century Borbala Nyiri, independent scholar Chapter 9. Jar Interventions: Ceramic Containers as Disobedient Objects in Contemporary Asian Art  Sooyoung Leam, The Courtauld Institute of Art, UK; title: Anna Grasskamp, University of St Andrews, UK  Chapter 10. Concluding Thoughts on Transformative Jars:  Asian Ceramic Vessels as Transcultural Enclosures  Anna Grasskamp, University of St Andrews, UK; title: Anne Gerritsen, University of Warwick, UK, and Leiden University, Netherlands  Index.