Contact us on (02) 8445 2300
For all customer service and order enquiries

Woodslane Online Catalogues

Exploring Fairyland

Illustrating and Printing the Chinese Garden
Description
Author
Biography
Sales
Points
Google
Preview
This book examines the celebrated 17th-century Ming Dynasty woodblock handscroll, Garden Scene at Huancui Hall. Created around 1600 for the merchant-scholar Wang Tingna, the print served as both a portrait of his Huizhou estate and a sophisticated tool for literati social positioning (the circle included Tang Xianzu, the Chinese Shakespeare, and Li Zhi, the renowned liberal thinker, who condemned some Confucian dogmatic principles). The narrative traces the artefact's own journey-from its creation and loss to its modern rediscovery-while placing it within the broader revitalisation of 17th-century Chinese print culture, a transformation influenced by early contact with Western techniques. Through the lens of this single artwork, rendered as an artistic 'fairyland,' the study explores how late Ming scholars materialised their intellectual and aesthetic ideals through hybridised printing skills. Drawing on extensive fieldwork by author Dr Li Xiaofei, which involved tracing village topography and reconstructing the print's production, the book illuminates how such images were conceived, made, and disseminated.
Dr Li Xiaofei is a senior researcher at the Chinese National Academy of Arts. A former visiting scholar at the University of Vienna's Department of Art History, he specialises in the history of Chinese printmaking and printing. His research in this field has been published in several influential monographs and academic articles. This book synthesises his expertise, offering new perspectives on the cultural and technical evolution of Chinese graphic arts.
This book examines the celebrated 17th-century Ming Dynasty woodblock handscroll, Garden Scene at Huancui Hall.
Google Preview content