Ink Plum
Subtitle: The Making of a Chinese Scholar-Painting Genre
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: October 13, 1996
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 366
ISBN-13: 9780521391528
Subjects: Oriental art; Painting in ink; Subjects & Themes - General; History - Asian; Ancient Oriental Art; Special Subjects In Art; Art; Art & Art Instruction; Genre painting, Chinese; ASIA; Ink painting, Chinese; Asian; Painting - Other Specific Subjects; Art / General; Flowering plums in art; Song-Yuan dynasties, 960-1368
Description: Ink plum (momei) has been one of the most admired and widely practiced genres of ink painting in East Asia throughout the last six hundred years. In this study, the first full account of momei, Maggie Bickford provides a comprehensive account of genre formation in Chinese painting.

Fully interdisciplinary in approach, it demonstrates how art historical, literary, cultural, and political situations, groups, and individuals acted upon one another to produce the birth of a new painting genre and its codification. The emergence of ink plum in the Song Dynasty, at the beginning of the twelfth century, and its codification under alien Mongol rule in the mid-fourteenth, can be documented precisely, allowing the modern scholar to observe at close range the formative processes of Chinese scholar-art.

Moreover, Ink Plum: The Making of a Chinese Scholar-Painting Genre examines critically the transformation of the alternative art of the Song scholar elite into the self-proclaimed orthodoxy of later Chinese painting.