Imagining Sculpture

(Hardback)

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Description

Sculpture is just a word, an English word, which elicits an image in the mind's eye. Sculpture is a European idea. In China statues, stele and other figural objects were made for millennia but not valued or collected as Sculpture. There was no Sculpture in China. Imagining Sculpture is the story of this something that did not exist.

Imagining Sculpture is a series of short vignettes, historical and fictional. Travelers, scholars, officials, collectors, and antiquarians encounter statues, figures, and effigies in China, Japan, England, Germany, France, Italy, and the United States from the fourteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. Imagining Sculpture is visual, cinematic and sumptuous-told with rare photographs, paintings, sketches, letters and ephemera. With little text, the argument is made by the images. Imagining Sculpture offers a new kind of visual narrative and offers a radically different way of seeing and knowing.

Reviews

"Abe has attempted something unusual, creative, and original in Imagining Sculpture. He has presented a . . . mosaic of people, scenes, and voices from a past time that could not know its future acknowledging that it is . . . an untidy story and a troublesome history. It too strives to be appropriate for its purpose * CAA *

Author Bio

Stanley Abe is associate professor in the Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. He is the author of Ordinary Images andserved as editor in chief of Archives of Asian Art from 2011 to 2018.