Bøger af Nancy Berliner

A rediscovery and appreciation of an intriguing form of Chinese painting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that encoded messages about modern society in realistic depictions of fragments from China's past. Developed during the mid-19th century in China, the bapo 'eight brokens' painting genre combines ingeniously realistic depictions of antique documents, such as calligraphies, rubbings, paintings, and pages from old books, sometimes alongside everyday contemporary ephemera including advertisements, receipts, and postmarked envelopes. The resulting seemingly haphazard, overlapping compositions contain coded reflections on the decay of cultural traditions, or wishes for the recipient's good fortune. This book explores the origins of bapo in Chinese visual culture and traces how it blossomed into an intriguing and inventive tradition in the hands of many artists.

With hundreds of photographs and a wealth of information Yin Yu Tang tells the history of a traditional Chinese house and the fascinating stories of its occupants. In the late Qing dynasty, around the year 1800, a prosperous Chinese merchant named Huang built a house for his family in a remote village southwest of Shanghai. He named the house Yin Yu Tang which means Hall of Abundant Shelterimplying his desire for the building to shelter many of his descendants. For seven generations, members of the Huang family ate, slept, laughed, cried, married and gave birth in the house.By the mid-1990s, the surviving members of the Huang family had moved away from Yin Yu Tang to take jobs in the cities. In 2003 the house found a new home as a permanent exhibit in the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. This book, with its room-by-room, generation-by-generation documentation of life in the house, serves as a unique and invaluable introduction to traditional Chinese family and village life.Nancy Berliner, one of the country's foremost experts on Chinese furniture and arts, takes the reader on a tour of this unique homestead providing detail on Chinese architecture, construction methods, decoration, furniture and family heirlooms. She weaves a story of domestic life in Chinese culture by explaining the traditions of the family who lived hereespecially their love and respect for family and ancestors. She also documents the remarkable restoration and reconstruction of Yin Yu Tang, truly a treasure trove of Chinese history.With hundreds of photographs, scores of primary documents, and thousands of fascinating details, Yin Yu Tang: The Architecture and Daily Life of a Chinese House offers a vivid portrait of everyday life in traditional China.