This book examines the work of one of the most famous Chinese artists of all time. In this study, the first full-length work on Shitao in a Western language, Jonathan Hay provides a theoretically sophisticated analysis of this artist by undertaking a social history of his achievement. By focusing on different social, political, biographical, economic, religious and aesthetic issues, the author reveals the full complexity of Shitao's practice. Throughout this study, Hay also argues for the modernity of Shitao's painting, showing how his work is embedded in the socioeconomic context of the seventeenth century and how it involves a redefinition of subjectivity in terms of self-consciousness, doubt, and an aspiration to autonomy.

Shitao: Painting and Modernity in Early Qing China (Res Monographs in Anthropology and Aesthetics)

Hay, Jonathan

Arts & Photography

Cambridge University Press

Sensuous Surfaces is a richly illustrated and in-depth introduction to the decorative arts in Ming- and Qing-dynasty China. Jonathan Hay explores materials and techniques, as well as issues of patronage and taste, which together formed a loose system of informal rules that affected every level of decoration in early modern China, from an individual object to the arrangement of an entire residential interior. By engaging the actual and metaphoric potential of surface, Hay contends, this system guided the production and use of the decorative arts during a period of explosive growth, which started in the late sixteenth century and continued until the mid-nineteenth century. This understanding of decorative arts in China made a fundamental contribution to the sensory education of its early modern urban population, both as individuals and in their established social roles. Sensuous Surfaces is also an elegant meditation on the role of pleasure in decoration. Often intellectually dismissed as merely pleasurable, Hay argues that decoration is better understood as a necessary form of art that can fulfill its function only by engaging the human capacity for erotic response.
 Featuring 250 color images of a wide range of early modern Chinese objects and artworks, this book will engage anyone with an interest in decoration, art, China―or the experience of pleasure itself.

Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China

History & Criticism

University of Hawaii Press

Tracing Taiwan

Yang, Alice

Drawing Center

Science Fiction and Posthumanism in the Anthropocene

Literature & Fiction

Bloomsbury Academic

With Sensuous Surfaces, Jonathan Hay offers one of the most richly illustrated and in-depth introductions to the decorative arts of Ming and Qing dynasty China to date. Examining an immense number of works, he explores the materials and techniques, as well as the effects of patronage and taste, that together have formed a loose system of informal rules that define the decorative arts in early modern China. Hay demonstrates how this system―by engaging the actual and metaphorical potential of surface―guided the production and use of decorative arts from the late sixteenth century through the middle of the nineteenth, a period of explosive growth. He shows how the understanding of decorative arts made a fundamental contribution to the sensory education of China’s early modern urban population. Enriching his study with 280 color plates, he ultimately offers an elegant meditation, not only on Ming and Qing art but on the importance of the erotic in the form and function of decorations of all eras.

Reaktion Books

Essay and interview with Jonathan Hay. Binders board cover. 12 color plates. 3 doutones. 5 black/white plates.

Chinese Work

Marden, Brice

Individual Artists

Matthew Marks

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Books by Hay, Jonathan